Paki Smith has bound his own books, worked over printed pages torn from books, printed on old vellum deeds and made countless note-books. He has treated the book as a medium in the same way that he would a canvas.
the rose hedge takes the form of an odyssey, chapters made with paintings, drawings and text—as if each chapter were a place, or reflected the sense of a place. Lived in. Mapped.
The essence of the book could be summed up in the words of a fragment of a Kipling poem stuck to the wall in the artist’s studio :
‘Must we sing for evermore
On the windless, glassy floor ?
Take back your golden fiddles and we’ll beat to open sea.’

PAKI SMITH paints, on occasion sculpts, and is an art director for films. Recent painting shows were entitled ‘Waiting’, ‘Garden of the Soul’, ‘Danger Unexploded Bomb’ and to coincide with this volume, ‘the rose hedge’.