Time spent amongst trees is never wasted time – An Artist Book

“Time spent amongst trees is never wasted time.”
— Katrina Mayer.

This quote was the starting point for my newest artist book.

What happens when we spend time among trees?

What shifts?
What do we begin to notice?
What happens when we slow down enough to pay attention?

This book was created for a very special exhibition at the Maroochy Bushland & Botanic Gardens, “Here, inspired by nature.”

I spent time walking through the Maroochy Bushland and Botanic Gardens at Tanawha, looking, listening and taking photographs. I was thinking about the experience of walking through a garden space surrounded by trees and landscape and tendered love of the natural environment.

At first, you notice the obvious things. The path. The trees. The shapes of leaves. The light.
Then other things begin to come forward.

That experience became the poem for the book.

Once the poem began to settle, I started thinking about how the physical structure of the book could carry the same experience.

The finished work is a book within a book.

The main structure is made from heavyweight printmaking paper. The poem has been letterpress printed across the pages, alongside embossed eucalyptus leaves and embossed waveforms created from recordings of bird calls from within the Gardens.

As the pages progress, the embossed marks increase.

The first pages are relatively quiet. As the reader moves through the book, more leaves and more birdsong begin to appear.

I wanted this gradual accumulation to reflect what happens when you spend time in a natural environment. The longer you stay, the more you notice.

Nested within the centre of the book is a second book: a concertina of photographs taken in the Gardens.

Each page of the outer book has an opening cut into it, allowing the concertina to sit within the larger structure. The two books can be turned independently.

This became an important part of the work.

The concertina holds the visible landscape.
The outer pages hold the poem, the sound and the tactile experience of embossed leaves.

The reader can move through both at their own pace, allowing image, words and touch to overlap in different ways.

The book is Coptic bound with clear acrylic covers, with sky-blue Japanese paper attached to the covers. The photographic imagery in the concertina has been printed in a green duotone, keeping the focus on shape, texture and the feeling of moving through foliage rather than reproducing the landscape literally.

I think about artist books as spaces where structure is part of the storytelling.

In this work, the book asks to be handled slowly.
Pages are lifted.
The embossed surface is felt.
The concertina is unfolded.
Images appear and disappear beneath the surrounding pages.

There is no single way to move through it.

And perhaps that is part of the point.

Time spent amongst trees does not need to produce anything.
Sometimes it simply gives us space to breathe, listen and notice what was already there.

This book is available for sale here.

The work will be shown in Here, inspired by nature at the Maroochy Bushland and Botanic Gardens in September 2026. The editioned books are available for sale.

Exhibition opening – Saturday 12 September 2026
Exhibition closes – Sunday 27 September 2026
Location – Maroochy Bushland & Botanic Gardens, Palm Creek Road, Tanawha Qld 4556

Colophon

Binding: Single-sheet Coptic binding
Book cover: Clear acrylic, Sky Kozo 35gsm
Book pages: Magnani Pescia 300gsm with blind embossing and Spectrum 18pt hand‑printed letterpress text
Internal book pages: Archival pigment print Awagami Kozo Thin 70gsm
Poem: Hiding in plain sight by Kim Herringe
Photographs: Kim Herringe, Karen Shaw

Meet Me in the Forest

If you love trees and you love poetry, you might like my new poetry book, Meet Me in the Forest. It is a self-published poetry book with ten poems about trees, written, dsigned and illustrated by me!