Jun 04 2009
bookasmagoria: the art of su blackwell
Su Blackwell is a Sheffield, UK artist who creates her strange and fairy-like panoramas out of paper cut-outs: frequently from books. Often her sculptures have literary themes, or use cut-outs from vintage illustrations. I’m always a little wary at the idea of cutting up a book, but I’ve also always been fascinated by the book as a transformative object, something that can be used in multiple ways (so long as they’re respectful; burning books for fuel or using them to wrap fish is not on). Here are a few of my favourite Su Blackwell pieces.
Additionally, here is a stop-motion animation advertisement she worked on for Beringer Vinyards.
I am always interested in hearing about any strange book-related trivia and ephemera: feel free to share your discoveries!
These are completely amazing & wonderful - thank you so much for sharing!
Sarah, the Mad Hatter Tea Party made me think of you and Hannah in particular. :D I almost posted a different Alice one instead, but no, it had to be the Tea Party.
Ooh, shiny. WANT.
And oh oh I have one! I actually got to look at a copy of The Humument, of which there are…I dunno, not many. This one wasn’t the original, but it was still pretty cool. This was at UEA, actually, in my Frontiers of Writing class, which was on different kinds of translation, basically; we did an exercise after this where we did something similar, although none of ours were as good.
AAAH, lovely. Thank you for sharing!
I love the idea of the book as a object — how it can be transformed, manipulated, loved. My obsession probably started a long time ago, but I think Thomas Wharton’s descriptions in The Logogryph were what really sparked it …
Rita, YES. Thomas Wharton was HIGHLY influential in my fascination with a book as an object; I am constantly flashing back to things in Salamander and The Logogryph (which I really need to buy; I miss them). I understand books and libraries in a wholly new way. One of the bits that always haunted me was the idea of the people with an entire book tattooed into their skin, and how it would be handed down from person to person; also, some of Flood’s book designs, both the pun-laden concepts and the more metaphysical. I find that some of these ideas of books + metaphysics is seeping into the Evangeline story…
Also, Sheffield FTW, if for no other reason than because it was near enough to Norwich that I heard it mentioned all the time. (Also Ipswich, which never failed to crack me up, solely because of a solitary mention of it in the DW ep “The End of the World.”)