Caroline Allen’s CCS Profiles and Features class in Spring 2007, now in blog form.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Book Arts

Wondering around the CCS building, you may have noticed books in a clear cabinet with pages sculpted and spiraled like ribbons for wrapping presents created in the book arts program. To find out more about “book arts,” I met with Linda Ekstrom, a CCS art professor. Noticing her bubble gum lipgloss, straight blonde hair and stylish black frames, I never thought this would be the Oz behind the creation and publication of books at CCS.

Book Arts is one of the three emphasis’s within the CCS Art Program and offers students the option to make their own short books or create art from already existing books. When I asked about book arts, she said, “You can think of book arts as one of the methods available to contemporary arts. Sometimes people think the idea of making books is not an art method. We think of a book as a cultural and symbolic object and a container of information.” Looking at one of the collaborative books the students made, it struck me how much detail they put into each one of the pages. Unique designs and styles add flavor to the pages and push the limit of the traditional black-font on white paper model. One student bound a book with thinly cut and delicately sliced bamboo pieces. She said that it might take one to three quarters to create a substantial hand-printed book. Still, many dedicated students, including 5 book arts majors, devote their free time into printing their own books.

Caitlin Macrae, a CCS student and a book arts major, opened a show on Thursday, May 24 in the CCS Art Gallery. Unlike most art galleries with signs that warn of consequences and possibly death, if you touch the pieces, she instructed to gallerygoers to “please touch everything.” By engaging the patrons with the text, she said that it “makes the art so much more tangible.” This is a way to make the words touchable. In the introduction to the gallery, she wrote that she was drawn to book arts because she felt “frustrated with and fascinated by that which wasn’t being conveyed by both the language itself and its visual display.” Her work is a response to language’s limits of expression. Her art aims to close the “spaces between what you want to say and what you can’t say” and express emotion. Her show displayed stuffed animal birds on shelves, handmade little books, and among other things, a spice rack. I asked whether she considered everything in her gallery a book and she told me, “I consider anything a book because I don’t think books [are confined to] shape, spine and pages.” “Books are amazing containers of time, space, and energy.”

Other students have toyed with the common definition of a book. Two sisters created a sort of paper doll book, inspired by their visit to their relatives as children. Others have designed books to showcase other writers poetry. However, it is not necessary to do letterpress printing. Professor Ekstrom creates sculptures from existing books. She showed me a book with a picture of a bible’s spilled out contents. It reminded me of a kid throwing up his lunch. She said that the program aims to take a cultural object, the book, and turn it into a sculptural form because “a book is already inherent with meaning.” By taking the book and altering it, spiraling its contents, it functions as a work of art. A book is unique in the sense that it has special qualities not found in other forms of art. For example, you can only see the pages of a book in time, whereas with painting or drawing, the work is available up-front in its entirety. They work with the uniqueness of this form of art to “build books based on the structures of books.”

Students in her classes have a variety of opportunities including making prints under their own press name, sending their books to shows in Chicago or Memphis, and selling their work to special collection libraries where book collectors might buy their work. The program teaches students to use their words sparingly and only when needed, like a cavemen drawing on a wall. Mrs. Macrae advises, “you don’t want to letterpress a word if it doesn’t mean something.” If you’re interested in sculpting or creating your own book, she said that the program “draws a lot of students from other majors,” especially students who “have a sense of what a book is about.” A beginning book arts class will be available in the fall for those interested.

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