LONDON.- Internationally renowned but accident prone artist Simon Faithfull has created a book cataloguing his mishaps. The book about accidents will be ‘discovered’ by accident but only by people who’ve had accidents; it’s called ‘Accident Book’.

UCLH Arts, has commissioned the artist Simon Faithfull to create an innovative and challenging artwork called Accident Book which chronicles, through text and drawing, in the form of a book, all the accidents that have occurred in the artist’s life.

From the 5th June the book will be left amongst the magazines found in 7 A&E departments across London and 1 in Cambridge.

Each participating hospital will have a supply of approximately 100 books from which they will place one or two at a time amongst the magazines within the waiting areas of their A&E, minor injuries, patient transport departments, or fracture clinic. Within each book will be some instructions to encourage the viewer to take the book away with them and to register their copy on the project website using a unique code found within each book. This unique artwork will no doubt be highly sought after by art collectors but only those people who have had a genuine misadventure, mishap or accident will have access to them.

Once logged onto the website the participant will record the location and date of the discovery of the book and feedback their reason for their visit to A&E.

The idea behind placing it within an A&E, apart from its obvious content, is a reference to people’s hidden curiosity when in a waiting room or A&E department and their need to communicate their own private drama. This curiosity stems from wanting to know the reason for a fellow human’s visit to the A&E. Accident Book enables them to satisfy this curiosity and at the same time contribute to an art work. An A&E ward can be a very soulless environment - reducing the patient to an item on a slow-moving conveyor-belt of care. As with other aspects of Faithfull’s practice, Accident Book aims to humanize what can otherwise be a very alienating environment of the A&E waiting room.

Accident Book follows on from a work that Simon Faithfull completed in 2006 called LOST. This was an inventory of all the objects that he had lost in his life - presented as a book that told the stories of how these objects departed. 500 of these books were then deliberately lost and are now making their way around the world - being found and re-lost by random people who register the books online.

Accident Book follows on from a work that Simon Faithfull completed in 2006 called LOST. This was an inventory of all the objects that he had lost in his life - presented as a book that told the stories of how these objects departed. 500 of these books were then deliberately lost and are now making their way around the world - being found and re-lost by random people who register the books online.