This floor sculpture is created out of used books that have both influenced me, and other readers. Each book has the pages methodically rolled and folded in ways to create a new form. Text and images of the pages create an abstracted texture on the whole of the sculpture due to its now altered pages.
The process of rolling the pages back into the book became a meditative process, one of re-reading pages in brief, scanning and contemplating ones own thoughts that the text then provokes. The words and images from the pages of the books have now become fragmented, and as a result they have created a new, abstract image, a new dialect on the pages. Words, letters, pictures, and other graphics, form both random and constant patterns. This new way of viewing the text calls to mind the great works from the Beat Generation, where dissembling and reassembling words to create new words, sentences, and phrases created poems.
Language is a vehicle to express ideas, thoughts, emotions, the human soul, is conveyed to others through the arts of all kind. As each author has taken their dreams and wrote them in these books their ability to communicate to us through text on pages was their expectation. In this sculpture these words that were visions that once influenced others are altered, broken down and removed from us, leaving the viewer to ponder as to what book it once was, and perhaps they know.
The construction and placement of the objects on the floor evokes a model of a city, the forgotten metropolis of the fast pace lives that it houses. Within these cities, this world we live in we find ourselves constantly surrounded by flashes of lights that create images, words, begging us to succumb to their every wish. We live in a world that perhaps has forgotten these books as what they once were, perhaps they can now all be read on a Kindle or an iPad or some other new media, but the initial physical encounter with the works and the pleasure one used to get from opening a new book and being intimate with its paper page is lost, as a society we need to now read fast and conveniently and also think of the world, thus movements to go green, which paper text does not fit in to that category. Our new media of today continues to push these old media into the shadows of the past. In response to how we read on our new technology, the floor sculptural pillars that the books create are read up and down or down and up, creating a movement that scrolls the text.
Books have come to symbolize for me all our great expectations; those obtained or unattained, the forgotten, the loss of innocence, and the ideal. The fragmentation of words and images on these transformed pages represent the modernity of this brave new world, the fast sporadic chopped lives of its people. There is the lack of continuous line as letters merge to create new words and form nonsense, like the sounds of the world coming together.
