Tag Archives: Alyson Kuhn

Cutting, baking, lasering and more to turn books into objets d’art

Hugh Hart’s Aug. 5, 2013 article for Fast Company takes a more buoyant approach than I do to a practice where books are used as the raw material for creating art objects (Note: Links have been removed),

They stalk books with X-Acto knives, tiny sandblasters, glue, paint, scissor, and a shared obsession for giving new form to old things. The resulting sculptures, as pictured in the upcoming Art Made From Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved and Transformed (Chronicle Books), extend the shelf life for phone books, encyclopedias, pulp fiction and fairy tales. Instead of winding up in the landfill, ink-on-paper artifacts can now be rejiggered as astonishing text objects that have nothing to do with words.

The book, Art Made from Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed by Laura Heyenga, Brian Dettmer, and Alyson Kuhn, due to be published Aug. 20, 2013, features artworks such as this one on the book’s cover,

Cover for Art Made from Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed

Cover for Art Made from Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed

There is a positive aspect to this art practice, from Hart’s article,

Art Made From Books, edited by Laura Heyenga, demonstrates how obsolete books can now serve sculptors as a 21st-century equivalent to marble or molding clay. Kuhn points out that, “The information is outdated, the paper is probably yellowed or worse, so the fact that a book can become something charming and creative and valuable in a new light is kind of great.”

Although I do wonder how the authors and contributors would feel about having their book turned into an art piece.

While Kuhn is suggesting that this represents a way to recycle materials that were headed to the landfill,  Jacqueline Rush Lee (one of the artists featured in the book) seems to be using books that feature their own art work and could still function as reading material,

I cringed when I saw her painting over that illustration although I do very much appreciate her pieces. Still, what did she destroy to make them? She’s not adding to the narrative as she suggests, she’s remaking a book into an art piece by destroying it and imposing her own narrative (such as it is) on what remains.Meanwhile, fewer and fewer paper books are being produced. The medium she and these artists are using for their work is disappearing or becoming more rare.