I am a fallen leaf

I am a fallen leaf is a single-copy artist’s book made from sewn maple leaves. The work speaks about life in a foreign country, homesickness, displacement, and the fragile attempt to remain whole after being separated from one’s familiar soil.

The book is made from leaves: living material that has already fallen, dried, changed colour, and become vulnerable to touch. Each leaf keeps the trace of a former life. Sewn together, they form pages, but these pages cannot be read in an ordinary way. They are too fragile, too bodily, too close to decay. The act of sewing becomes an act of care, repair, and temporary preservation.

The maple leaf carries several meanings at once. It is a found object from the new environment, a sign of the place where I live now, and at the same time a metaphor for migration: a leaf detached from its tree, carried away, lying on foreign ground. The book tells a story of homesickness through material rather than narration. It does not describe longing directly; it lets longing appear through texture, fragility, dryness, colour, and the impossibility of returning the leaf to the tree.

It can be described as a bio-ecological artist’s book. This definition is precise for me because the book exists between biography and ecology. It is biographical, because it speaks about my own experience of living in another country. It is ecological, because it uses organic matter not as an illustration, but as the body of the book itself. The material is not neutral: it ages, breaks, dries, and can disappear.

I am a fallen leaf is a small book about exile, attachment, and the unstable border between a document and a living remnant. It asks what remains of a life when it is cut off from its original landscape, and whether fragility itself can become a form of memory.

Download "I am a fallen leaf" PDF.

Sewn maple leaves, 30 x 30 cm, 2023