A man works inside a bakery in the rebel-controlled area of Maaret al-Numan town in Idlib province, Syria December 17, 2015. (Photo by Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)
Justin Rowe creates these magical sculptures from hand cut books and found images with the help of just a touch of gum arabic and 24 carat gold or palladium leaf. Some are very much in the realms of fairy stories like the one above, but my favourites are the stories below where Justin’s skill brings the book’s own illustrations to life.
Georgia Russell is a Scottish artist who slashes, cuts and dissects printed matter, transforming books, music scores, maps, newspapers and photographs into patterned abstractions that leave a resemblance of the original but transport it to another time and place where everything is fragmented, and always in flux.
American photographer Thomas Allen constructs witty and clever dioramas using figures cut from the covers of old pulp paperbacks. Using salacious pulp art drawing’s of the ’40s and ’50s that covered books such as ” I Married a Dead Man” and ” Marihuana Girl’, Allen constructs one set of pictures up close while obscuring another, and in the process creates a different context. Each piece is given a brand new storyline, though never quite strays from their cheeky origins.
The agency Van Wanter Etcetera collaborated with Souverein to create the “Written Portraits” series of 3D author to promote literature and autobiographies in Holland. The series of artworks was produced to promote Dutch Book Week this year.
This series of work is a collection of wooden books in which all kinds of details emerge from the raw material. Hands reach out, trying to escape the confines of the pages, faces seem to appear out of nowhere, and unknown characters are set behind wooden bars, trapped within the various pieces with titles like The Book of Life, The Magic Mountain, and The Book of Dreams. Orlandi has a vivid imagination and his fine works bring the characters of these storybooks to life in front of our eyes.