I bound my first book a couple years ago. I ripped the paper out of an old art sketchbook, and made the covers out of cardboard and jeans. For a few months it served as my journal (or, if you’ll indulge me, my jearnal), and it served this function perfectly usefully, if not anything close to beautifully. Bookmaking, I soon realized, is a hard art: a good, beautiful book takes a lot of time and tools, and a certain amount of patience that I may well lack.
Imagine my enjoyment, then, when I walked into Liggett Studio this week to view Teresa J. Wilber’s “BookArts: Beyond Expectation,” which turns out to be a show all about books and the exciting, fucked-up ways you can make them. They’ve got books you’ve never imagined in here! Books shaped like little river stones. A book made out of a nutmeg seed! They didn’t show me that in the 15-minute YouTube course I took.
The exhibition asks a really good question: “What is a book?” You might think you know the answer. But the longer you spend with this show, the less certain you’ll feel about it. Even the first piece you see, “Dragon Scale Book: The Bardo of Being” by Cindy Cotner, is a 3.5-foot long book which opens toward the viewer along its spine; the pages are flipped via a pair of chopsticks.
Physicality and touch are important parts of this exhibition. Many of the books invite touch, or have a pair of gloves sitting in front of them, asking the viewer to put them on before handling the book. Especially nice to the touch are the rock-shaped books mentioned earlier, by Illinois-based Pamela Paulsrud, who is the Featured Artist of the show. Paulsrud has many pieces spread across the show, but these tiny little guys spoke the most to me. They’re intimate, quiet, and very funny.
Tulsa artist Sasha Martin has a similarly small, but surprisingly moving, piece in the show: two books, one made out of a nutmeg seed, and one made out of a cinnamon stick. It seems almost impossible that they’re actually books; what kind of book could be so tiny? And yet they’re bound, and quite fetching to look at!
One of the strongest pieces in the show is from Tulsa artist Sidney McLeod, whose “This Body Doesn’t Belong To Me” is a bound book of art and writing which investigates chronic illness and pain. The art, registered in intaglio, a form of relief printing, looks like blooms of smoke across the pages, or something almost medical in nature: ultrasounds of a cell. The book is beautifully bound, and with the white gloves offered, I went page by page, enjoying the feel of a book that is one of a kind.
The whole exhibition is indeed one of a kind, offering the viewer glimpses of books one wouldn’t have thought possible. Wilber, the curator of the show, has gathered a surprising and fantastical collection of book-based art: from the cheeky and merely bookish to highbrow conceptual art and pieces that have important things to say to contemporary issues. I can highly recommend this show. I’m gonna go home and write about it in my jearnal.
