In one of my first posts for the Millons, a post on books used for purposes other than reading, I mentioned the British artist Su Blackwell and her book cut sculptures. Blackwell’s work is enchanting and I find myself (in week six of a post-dissertation/graduate school illiterate malaise in which I have read nothing, nothing, nothing and now fear I will never read or want to read again – though reading and books have been the defining activity and object of my life until now) drawn again to Blackwell.
Blackwell’s work recollects the shoebox dioramas of cut paper scenes that children make in grade school, but in Blackwell’s sculptures all of the two and three-dimensional figures are cut out of the printed or illustrated pages of books and seem to spring out of the book from which they were cut (a single volume is often the platform on which and out of which her little still-life fairytale scenes spring). Occasionally, she incorporates lights into her sculptures and her scenes are often housed in wooden boxes, but otherwise Blackwell’s sole medium is books.
While cutting old books apart might seem a bit sacrilegious to a bibliophile, the results are so delicate and beautiful – so suggestive of the other worlds that good books make real – that you’ll easily forgive the iconoclasm. In their surprisingly literal way, Blackwel’s sculptures remind us of the vistas of imagination that art, particularly literary art, allow us to encounter – worlds that are in some sense, Blackwell reminds us, made from such paltry ingredients: ink and paper. In the throes of my ongoing bout of illiteracy, I find this reminder comforting – an enthralling approximation of the readerly places I can’t get to myself just now.
