‘Vandalised, disembowelled and dismembered’: Artist Jack Milroy gives books a brutal treatment with beautiful results

The artist Jack Milroy’s new exhibition sees book characters flee the confines of their pages — literally. ‘Bilbiophilia’, which opened at the Shapero Modern in London yesterday and runs for a month, features illustrated birds flying, fish swimming, and flowers blooming from their pages in pieces of 3D cut-out art.

The 87-year-old artist, who is based in Sussex, began his creative education at Scarborough School of Art in North Yorkshire, before going on to study at London University. His work has been acquired by the V&A Museum, the British Library, the Imperial War Museum and the UK Government Art Collection. His fascination with 3D cut-outs began almost 60 years ago, and has been heavily inspired by Picasso and Max Ernst.

‘I am very excited about the show, actually, because it’s taking place in a gallery attached to an antiquarian bookshop, and quite a bit of my work involves working with books. It seems a very neat connection,’ Jack says. It is his first exhibition with Shapero Modern, the gallery that sits just below Shapero Rare Books in central London. He says that while the books upstairs are ‘carefully presented in pristine condition’, his books below have been ‘vandalised, disembowelled and dismembered,’ for his art.

His pieces feature books that are ‘not meant to be read’ but are for reflecting ‘perhaps on the demise of the book as a purveyor of information and knowledge’. Jack previously explored book-related art in his exhibition 'Post Card-Post Book' at Benjamin Rhodes Gallery, also in London. ‘It was an accident,’ says Jack, on how books came to be such a major theme in his work. ‘I was given a book when I was at art school by a friend. It was a manual of operative surgery and one day… I thought maybe I should just operate on this book.’

The exhibition also includes pieces made from tins of sardines. This is reminiscent of an early series of Jack’s work where he ate sardines for lunch for 100 days, in order to collect enough tins to use in his artwork. Did it put him off the food for life? ‘No, I love them,’ he reassures me. ‘They’re from Waitrose, they’re called Sardine Piccanti and I’m still eating them. In fact, I did a piece with them the other day. I just titled it “Monday the 13th of April”, or whatever the day was that day.’

His creative process, he says, is simple: ‘I don’t have a plan. I just do whatever comes into my head, as it were.’ With the exhibition, his goal is positivity. ‘It's such gloomy times at the moment, and a lot of art now seems to be rather dispiriting and focusing on the miseries of life,’ Jack says. ‘I suppose I wanted my work to bring joy, in a way. I think it should be pleasurable to see it, and I also want people to walk away with it and take it away with them in their heads.’

Bibliophilia runs until May 17 at Shapero Modern, New Bond Street, London