I carved this beauty of soap... SOAP! THE KIND YOU RUB YOUR BUTT WITH!!

Here is my soap sculpture. It's almost ready for judging tomorrow. I just have to build a base. I think I'm going to use film negatives to sit it on. I'm just going to add some texture and smooth out the bottom.

Book Sculpture Ships and Artist Statement

Not once have I had an art project progress that way that this one has. I knew right away

that I wanted to some kind of paper objects, made from pages of books, but deciding what was rather difficult. First, I made a castle, then a windmill, then a lighthouse, then finally my ships. Each object has something in common though, they are each a fantasy that the pages of a popular fiction book often depict.

For this project I wanted to take that fantasy and make it tangible, viewable, and put it in reference to the books that contain it. Instead of reading about the journey of these ships, your watching them, cannons raised high, deciding in your mind who is captain, whose going to win the battle, or even if there is going to be a battle at all. I've made the fantasy more accessible to the consumer.

The Many Faces of my Book Art

In class, I've made a lighthouse and a castle. At home, I sculpted a windmill... all made out of pages from the books I've collected. I'm having trouble putting this one together, because none of them seem to serve the purpose I want to.

I think my problem is that I'm creating structural objects, instead of living, moving objects that have a sense of adventure. Because of this, I'm going to attempt to build giant ships. Two of em.

They might even battle.

Focus on the Artist: M.L. Van Nice

M. L. Van Nice is another book artist that alters the book to create sculpture and meaning. His piece I included above titled "Swiss Army Book" is intricate, complicated, with lots of meaning. He's got the book serving a much bigger purpose than just to contain words and pages.

Focus on the Artist: Brian Dettmer

Brian Dettmer is a book artist, who creates amazing sculpture pieces out of books and pages. His work reminds me of Tom Friedmans in a way because of the obsession that goes into each one. They are extremely intricate and confusing, but are very, very beautiful and crazy. Here are a couple examples that I highly recommend viewing larger to see all the crazy.

The more I see about book art, the more I understand why it's it's own genre of art. The book is beautiful and represents so many differing things to many different people. Art is all about meaning, so naturally art created out of books makes sense.

Focus on the Artist: Diane Cassidy

Diane Cassidy is a book artist I discovered on bayareabooks.com. She creates typical bound books, with some pretty extraordinary things. She does Jacob Ladder's books, books from chocolate wrappers, and more. I found her work to be really well done. She has amazing craft, and great ideas in keeping each one unique and inspiring.

Focus on the Artists: Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni, like Yoko Ono, used performance art using her entire body including hair, brain, arms, and legs. She is a contemporary artist who, through her performance, made people think, analyze, and ask questions.

I think its' really great that she puts herself into her art. One piece I read she did, she slept while a machine tracked her sleep. Then while she was awake, she sewed a blanket with  the guide from the EEG machine. She did this for eight days! Crazy, but really cool.

Focus on the Artists: RTmark

RTmark helped artists who had oppositions with giant corporations and other big business vs. the man type of narratives. It served as a website where people would vote on what they should do by providing the funding.

One piece they did, was replace the voice boxes in Barbies with G.I. Joes so that the G.I. Joes talked like girls, and the Barbies talked like men. I thought it was a good statement of how we expose our children to cliches. Men do it this way. Women do it this way. It's not always the case.

Castle Book Sculpture

Going along with a theme of lighthouses, I constructed a good-sized castle structure out of a book.

By the way, I bought a huge stack of books at the thrift store. All for a book. I tried only books with nice old pages, and big thick hard covers.

Focus on the Artist: Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is a very popular conceptual artist who defined the genre even further. She performed lots of performance art, and displayed installations that put the viewer into the art. Some viewers would have to climb ladders all the way up to the ceiling jus to see the piece.

Another piece she performed was a performance piece where the viewer took turns cutting pieces of her clothing off. It had a striking narrative of how we treat women, how women allow themselves to be treated, and was both difficult and entrancing to watch.

Book Sculpture Brainstorm Sketches

Started my next art project today. We're doing book sculpture, which, to me, sounds kind of open ended. I like the idea of objects coming out of an open book. Maybe illuminated with flickering lights or even movement if that's possible.

I like the image of a lighthouse, being illuminated with the text from the book pages coming through.

Here's a couple of preliminary sketches.