The Written Image: Crystallized Books

Inspired by books and magazines she found discarded on the street, Oakland-based artist Alexis Arnold explores the vulnerability of printed media by transforming books into sculptures with crystallized borax.
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Inspired by books and magazines she found discarded on the street, Oakland-based artist Alexis Arnold explores the vulnerability of printed media by transforming books into sculptures with crystallized borax.
To create her delicate book sculptures, Swedish artist Cecilia Levy considers the history, materiality, and composition of old books sourced from her surroundings.
Dallas artist Simeen Farhat crafts text-inspired sculptures in a complex process that blends literary and figurative composition and reminds viewers of language’s physicality.
A special “unburnable” edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was crafted to raise awareness about recent efforts to ban books from schools and libraries.
The celebrated Bulgarian bookmaker Stopan calls on his country’s craft traditions to create fantastical artist’s books that are “both in and out of folklore.”
Writer and visual artist Ben Shattuck turned his journals from walks through New England’s wild spaces into a book of drawings and text titled Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau.
To bring attention to gendered book marketing, designer Christine Rhee reenvisions the covers of classic and contemporary books in her satirical series “Fake Books for Men” and “Fake Books for Women.”
Writer Sophie Calle took a job as a maid at a Venice hotel to secretly study the lives of its guests. Her diary of observations and photos compose The Hotel, a book whose provocative methods have inspired other artists.
In a new graphic novel, comic artist Theo Ellsworth adapts Jeff VanderMeer’s tale of a mysterious building where “office culture” connotes secret languages and unspoken rituals.
Writer and artist Patricia Hanlon has turned her experiences swimming in New England’s wild salt marshes into a book and a series of landscape oil paintings.