Clockwise from left: Cara Barer finds phone-books and computer manuals worthy of graceful portraits. Dan McPharlin creates miniature cardboard replicas of vintage recording equipment. Richard Sweeney’s Icosahedron blurs the lines between nature and architecture. Jim Rosenau’s Steps to Better Reading takes a literal approach to book shelves.

scenes like the infamous tea party to life by placing cutouts from Lewis Carroll’s tale amongst a forest of life-sized books.

Some paper artists are so enthralled with their medium that they use books in their entirety as building blocks. Robert The, of bookdust.com, carves hardcovers into powerful shapes. The Art Crisis becomes an ominous black handgun, for example.

Jim Rosenau, of Berkeley, Calif., takes a utilitarian approach. He constructs shelves and cases out of various volumes. Rosenau, whose father and maternal grandfather were publishers, made his first bookcase from a set of 1938 encyclopedias. “Books carry so much symbolic freight,” he says. “But as a material, they provide color, texture, fonts, and a pleasing form.”

Furthering the leap to functionality, Takeshi
Ishiguro designed a sort of coffee table pop-up for

Artecnica called Book of Lights, from which a simple low-voltage lamp springs when the cover is cracked open. Atelier Bomdesign of the Netherlands, on the other hand, has made warm, literate lamp shades by splaying book pages around a light bulb suspended from the ceiling.

Whether today’s paper artists are cutting, photographing, or building with the stuff, paper presents reams of opportunity.

 

For more information and article sources, go to craftzine.com/05/paperroundup.

Megan Mansell Williams is a former marine biologist who writes about science and culture from her home in San Francisco. An assistant editor for the UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni magazine, Forefront, her freelance work appears in Discover, Inkling, MAKE, CRAF T, and Via.