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Contemporary book art defies easy classification and has been written, talked, and argued about by leading theorists, critics and artists without consensus. Book art takes on many shapes and sizes, uses a wide variety of media, samples from every possible mode of production, and has participated in every movement of mainstream art. It is this diversity of book art that makes it so difficult to define and, as a result, there is a constantly shifting idea of the medium, exaggerated by artists continually pushing at the few tenuous boundaries.
Books and language have been a constant source of inspiration throughout my practice. Not unlike the open definition of book art, my work can be hard to classify into a single category or style. My recent explorations have resulted in both sculptural and traditionally bound books that investigate issues of form, content, word, and image, using both handmade and commercial production methods.
In my work, I often use found books as content, both as subject matter and raw material. By fragmenting a text and shifting the placement and ordering of the words I can generate a rhythm that draws you through the book, creating poetry out of the otherwise mundane. By cutting and rebinding pages into a new form, the relationship between the content of the original book and the resulting form adds an extra layer of meaning and complexity. Adapting traditional binding structures and exaggerating the shapes and proportions cause the books become sensual objects no longer meant to be read from cover to cover but instead seen as an immediate and cohesive whole.
A book is often referred to not as the physical object but as the information stored within. The meticulously ordered typographic characters that make up a book are effectively invisible as we scan them to gain that information. By manipulating the text or exaggerating the structure, the books become more than just containers for information and instead their essential physical qualities take on ever more prevalence and meaning.
Please click here to view Susan’s resume.
Susan Porteous
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