graphic design, art, typography and architecture

I like the work of Georgia Russell, a Scottish artist who creates art from books. Armed with a scalpel and a bucket-load of imagination, she sculpts books, maps and other ephemera into wonderful pieces of art that are often-times displayed in acrylic cases, so that they appear as some kind of specimen. One piece titled, The Ruptures cultures resembles a sea creature or the fine fossilised remains of one. Many of the works have an “organic” feel to them, the finely cut strands of paper resembling windswept grass or aquatic filamental fibres. Though each piece is the product of a myriad incisions, slices and cuts, the source material (most often a book) remains centre-stage, so that the art grows out of the book. A really wonderful idea, that’s beautifully executed.

Russell uses a scalpel instead of a brush or pen, and works with obsessive perseverance and patience to make her constructions of cut paper. She appropriates found materials and utilises their decorative qualities and inherent potential as she manipulates, cuts and transforms books, music scores, newspapers, currency, maps and photographs.

Russell’s work with books and ephemera first began in Paris while she was still at the Royal College of Art. Old books have always seemed to her like sculptural objects which had their own history, ‘representing the many hands which have held them and the minds they have passed through’. She resurrects her discovered materials to give them ‘a new life and new meaning’. There is a simultaneous sense of loss and preservation in each work as she wants to retain and reclaim the past as much as her techniques attack it.

Source: England & Co.