Interview by Caroline IssaPortrait by courtesy of LOEWE

CI You trained in Tokyo and London with three very different bookbinders – Yamazaki Yo, Nishio Aya and Mark Cockram. What did each of them leave in your hands?

AK Yamazaki-sensei gave me my first glimpse of what it meant to be invited into the world of bookbinding. I only spent four days with him in Tokyo, but he was the first teacher who asked me to join a bookbinding exhibition. That tiny gesture made me feel that what I was doing could be seen. When I went back to Singapore to set up my own studio, I copied his orderliness exactly: everything in its place, very Japanese, very neat and calm.

Nishio Aya is very reserved, so I didn’t get to know her deeply, but she was the bridge to London. She had been a student of Mark Cockram, and that’s how I ended up in his studio. I spent about ten months with Mark in total. He erased everything Yamazaki had taught me in terms of temperament. Where Yamazaki was immaculate, Mark worked in what I would call organised mess. It suited me better; the chaos felt closer to life. Mark would say, “Start at step five, maybe try step eight, then go back to step one.” It sounds absurd, but it opened my mind. When I was shortlisted for the Loewe Craft Prize, he was the first person I called.

CI You’re also a conservator, working with fragile historical books. How has that forensic intimacy with old damage changed the way you design new work?

AK If bookbinding trained my hands, conservation trained my mind. When I started binding, it was all muscle memory: folding, sewing, cutting, getting the body to repeat a motion until it’s habitual. Conservation added theory – the chemistry of materials, the history of structures, the ethics of intervention. More importantly, it gave me access. You can’t just walk into a library and ask, “Show me your thousand-year-old books.” As a conservator, institutions trust that your hands know what they’re doing. I’ve held Byzantine bindings that are more than a thousand years old. You notice tiny decisions that nobody today would consider worth that amount of labour. We like to think of ourselves as the advanced ones, but the books I see from the 1970s are often in worse condition than those from 400 or 800 years ago. Looking at those older bindings makes me question what we’ve decided is expendable. It influences how much care I put into parts that most readers will never consciously register.

CI Bookbinding has a reputation for being almost monastic. Do you experience it that way, or is it more about risk and problem solving for you?

AK It’s all of that. Some sections are extremely repetitive – folding and cutting paper, sewing signature after signature– and that really does feel like Tai Chi.You sink into a rhythm and everything narrows to the next crease, the next stitch. Then there is a stage in traditional binding that people always find shocking: rounding the spine. The finished curve looks so gentle, but the act of creating it is brutal. You take a hammer and hit the spine with a lot of force. When I bring students to that moment, you can see the horror in their eyes – they thought bookbinding was delicate, and suddenly they’re asked to assault the book. But you’re not destroying it, you’re forcing the spine into the shape it’s meant to have. The first time, you will almost certainly bang it out of shape. You have to train the hands and the eyes until they understand something that I cannot fully explain in words. I can show the motion but you have to internalise the nuance.

CI Endless, your Loewe piece, takes one tiny component of the book – the endband – and turns it into a continuous sculptural loop. Why the endband and how did you get from a strip at the top of a spine to this closed circle?

AK In a binding, there are a few operations I truly love: folding and cutting paper by hand, and sewing endbands. Endbands are those small bands you see at the top and bottom of the spine, often just a sliver of colour. The tragedy of sewing endbands is that they end. You start, and by the time your fingers really find the rhythm, the length of the book is over and you’re done. During my master’s in conservation, I started to wonder: could you bind a book with endbands only – no glue, no other sewing? I made a model that was just endband sewing in white thread, and it quickly became boring. I left the experiment half-finished but I got my answer: structurally, it was possible.

For my Loewe Craft Prize submission, I wanted to return to that question but give myself permission to enjoy it. I decided to work the way I would on a “real” book, using colour and letting the threads run free. The challenge then became structural: an endband usually has a core, made of leather or paper, and it’s anchored by the book block. It’s not designed to hold itself up. If I wanted the endband to be an independent object, I needed a different core – something rigid. I ended up using thick aluminium wire.

I started with small quires – the little sections that make up a book – because I had no idea if the structure would behave. If I followed the habitual logic of the codex, I would get a long rectangular snake that still… ended. My husband asked, “What if it doesn’t end?” We argued about that. It had to end somewhere. Then he asked, “What if it ends when it meets itself?” Of course: a circle. A circle only ends when it meets itself. Once that thought landed, it was obvious: I no longer cared if it qualified as a book in the conventional sense. I wanted to see what would happen if the endband finally got its own closed, continuous life. Endless is the answer to that question.

CI We’re living through an age of screen reading, even as print sales seem to be having these periodic resurgences. What can a handbound book – or a work like Endless – offer that no digital object can?

AK I’ll confess immediately: I read on a Kobo. I read too much for it to make sense to carry everything physically, especially when I travel. I’m not anti-digital, but the difference between a digital file and a book is like the difference between streaming and vinyl. People still buy records because they want the friction; the little imperfections become part of the experience. We all learnt during Covid-19 that people instinctively stage themselves in front of bookshelves on video calls. The physical presence of books in a room still matters to us in ways we can’t fully articulate. .