Allen: So this is called a Bookmatch Book (BMB), and it’s made out of two elements, which is this table… and this table is made from Yellow Wood that I got from Carla (Crafford’s) mother’s house. The leaves were messing on the neighbours’ roof, so I had to [trim off a few branches] and we did minimal damage. So this is a Yellow Wood table with a Kiaat top, and what I’ve done here is… if you cut a plank in half, and you open those two halves and put them next to each other, and you join it again it’s called a book-match, because it’s almost like a Rorschach Test where you squeeze ink and open it and you get that sort of butterfly look. And these little pins that join the wood together are called butterflies. And on top of [the table] is the Bookmatch Book.

All of these [pages] are book-matched – so, you can see, they’re mirrors of one another, and they’re joined with little butterflies. All of this wood is just wood that I’ve picked up next to the street… this is Karee which is quite a familiar tree: it’s got these long, drooping [leaves] and a very rough bark. The wood actually starts out very cream-coloured, and as it oxidises it becomes redder.

This is Olive Wood, which someone picked up next to the road and gave to me. This is Sweet Thorn which makes those yellow puff balls with lot of pollen round about this time of the year, and they’re all next to the highways. It’s also a very good [tree] for, if you’re living in the Karoo, it’s a Karoo Acacia, and what it does is, it grows with very harsh conditions and creates shade, and then more sensitive plants can grow underneath it. This is an Australian wood. This is Carob Tree wood, which is obviously what you can make that chocolate substitute from.

W: Health chocolate.

A: Health chocolate, apparently, although I think Cocoa is perfectly healthy.

W: (nods) But the Cocoa Tree does not have wood. Theobroma doesn’t have wood, but Ceratonia has wood. This is good wood!

A: It’s fantastic, and it also looks a bit like bacon which I quite enjoy! This is Bauhinia from Angus and Rina’s house. This is a camphor tree, which is what they use to make Vick’s vapour rub. They boil the sawdust, then all the oils come through and they collect it to make medicines and so on. Then there’s Syringa which makes those little yellow berries, and the beautiful white and lilac flowers, I think a month or two ago they were blooming. And then this last bit of wood is a mulberry tree, which I picked up at Nirox.

I’ve spent all this time collecting these woods, and I’m fascinated by their beauty, characteristics and all of that.

W: What fascinates me is that the very thing that we sacrifice (winks) that’s the word! Sacrifice, in order to make books and paper: the tree, as a living thing, that we have to cut it down, and pulverise it to some slush, and then we cast paper from that, that that is reversed, it’s like a monument to the thing that was sacrificed. The tree – to make paper. So this book is very much an homage piece to the living tree

Johan Stegmann to Willem: Are you able to read the book?

W: I try!

Colleen Winter: A technical question: you haven’t stained the wood? These are the pure colours?

A: Ya, all of these works have got a penetrating liquid wax, which is a very fine wax which can penetrate the wood, and then on top of that I use an antique furniture wax, which is a blend of different oils. It’s easier to maintain than varnish, which starts flaking at some point, and because I have moving parts I don’t want the varnish to harden on them. Also, the wax doesn’t change the colour, it only enriches the colour of the wood.

W: But the structure of this thing, compared to bookbinding – the most delicate art of bookbinding – stitching and sewing, and (points to BMB) that’s stitching and sewing. You know, on TV sometimes, and you can Google it, there’s this guy with these machines that roll along the beach…

A: Theo Jansen

W: Yes. There is such engineering skill in the binding of this book, that I dare any bookbinder to match this.

Rob Burchell: Allen, why are there only 9 pages? Why not 8 or 10? It’s unbalanced.

A: A lot of the stuff that I do, in my studio, I don’t know where I’m going. So I’ll pick up a piece of wood, and the bark is grey and boring, and I’ll cut it open and see “wow, this wood is bright red inside” and then I’ll cut it up into planks, and I’ll leave it, and carry on, and get more wood and cut it up, and then someone will give me an old cabinet, and the stuff starts to accumulate and I don’t know where I’m going, and at some point I had 9 types of wood that were sufficiently dry, that I had identified correctly, and that were beautiful to me, and the stock was thick enough to do the bookmatch, and the sizes were all sort of similar, so the stars aligned at that point, and there’s 9 pages.

Also, what’s interesting is I didn’t trim the height of any of these pages… when a person gets paid to chop down a tree, he cuts it into these kind of section because it’s easy to throw on the bakkie. So the size of the wood sort of relates to an A3 page, which I thought is nice, because none of these trees were cut down by the same person and no one was instructed to do it that way, it’s just the natural utility of… a person who cuts down a tree and removes it, ends up making those sizes.

W: My encounter with wood is often through the bags of wood that they leave for firewood, for braaivleis, and those come sometimes from the same sort of size like this (demonstrates 40cm gap with hands) and it’s been chopped up. And the fact that you have to sacrifice wood all the time – you have to burn it for firewood. Xylocaust. You know the ancient Greeks had a thing where they sacrificed horses, they called it the hippocaust. The horses were supposed to be a token of their feeling at the time, they wanted to say they’re sorry or they’re glad, to express that they would sacrifice horses. Sometimes they sacrificed everything, the best usually of what they had, to show respect or thankfulness or anger, different ways of expressing. But they would sacrifice! That would be called… Holos means everything: Holocaust. Though in this case it’s Xylocaust – I just made it up! Because I don’t think there’s such thing as a dendrocaust! There you go! It’s your altar, and there’s the sacrifice.

A: What’s nice about the altar idea is, my work sort of falls into two categories, either it’s a tool, or a machine, or a contraption for a use, or it’s an altar which just commemorates something, and I haven’t told you that but it’s great that you saw it because those are the two categories that I imagine my work falling into. And I absolutely want to celebrate the wood.