Böcker av June Leaf

This book is an intricate facsimile of a diary/sketchbook June Leaf filled during travels throughout Japan in 1970. Through sprawling drawings in pencil and ink, paintings, collages, and handwritten and typed thoughts, Leaf spontaneously captured her impressions on a journey both joyous and difficult, of pleasure and what she calls "that torture that occurs sometimes during travel." From real scenes like the view through the plane window approaching Japan, streetscapes, landscapes and a portrait of a passenger and conductor in a Hiroshima streetcar, to imagined visions including what she calls "scenes of paradise or Garden of Eden," image and text mingle like the accumulation of experiences over time. Following the approach to the facsimile of Leaf's Record 1974/75. Mabou Coal Mines published by Steidl in 2010, the paper and binding cloth of Japan 1970 closely match the originals, to transport us as deeply as possible into Leaf's intensively creative and self-reflective mind.

People is a facsimile re-print of a 1994 book on June Leaf's sculptures, many of them kinetic, needing just a light touch, the pull of a trigger or a single breath to come to life. Leaf has described her sculptures as drawings, their wiry forms carving and unfurling into space like exploratory lines on a page. Playing and fighting figures, animals and contraptions in the tinkering spirit of Jean Tinguely emerge from intuitive combinations of brass, copper and tin; found metal rods and blades; wood and paint. Regardless of her subject, Leaf's focus is on visceral whimsy, movement, and ceaseless renewal through material and process: "I think of myself as a dancer making art," she says, "or an aviator making art."