Wild Muse Notes ♣ Aria Nadii’s Weblog

“We can no longer physically read the book, so in that way it is made redundant; and yet on another level it has taken on a new life and is telling a different story.”

This is from the artist statement for Su Blackwell. These are called book cut sculptures. I found the link through Blue Tea and I’ve never seen anything like them. It was fascinating to read Su Blackwell’s description of her process and how it relates to my own work with books and manuscripts, even though our results are so different. It’s nice to find another book pirate who loves the alchemical transformation of pages into artifacts as much as I do. She also uses mythic and storybook themes in her work.

“The wear on my books, as physical objects, holds their history and makes my relationship with their contents immediate and visceral. The books I carry when I travel get stained and frayed, and the damage tells a story. I love second-hand books that have been marked up with pencil because I can see what was important to the person who read it before me.”