Brian Dettmer's Fantastical Book Sculptures
Brian Dettmer creates fantastical book sculptures. He uses a take-away process, using a skilled and patient editing artfulness, digging through layers of a book’s pages. He looks for text and pictures to save, and cuts away the rest.
There are at least a few aspects of books as objects that Brian works with – the spine and hard covers which act as solid building blocks, the flexible pages, and the variability of content on each page.
The books that are best suited for his work are large, old encyclopedias and dictionaries with sturdy spines and packed with illustrations and text.
Once Brian chooses a book that suits his next project, the magic begins – the aspect of his work that makes it uniquely his. His carving away at pages are his particular poetic choices - excavating for words and pictures that will be juxtaposed next to (or on top of) each other. He’s looking to create stories out of whatever book he chooses to work with, searching for meaning to find and share. He works at creating a meaningful story with literal layering in sculptural form.
Brian crafts single, stand-alone books, or connects and intertwines several books into a new shape. He has shaped books into skulls, skeletons, animal remains, carousels, and totems before doing his excavations on the texts.
"It's a completely sculptural subtractive process. So, in a way it's almost a metaphor for reading, because while I'm carving through, I don't know what I'm going to come across.
It's an excavation so I'm not adding any color or doing any drawing. I really want the actual book to become a collaborator with me."
Brian Dettmer
You can hear Brian talk about his work in the TED talk Brian Dettmer: Old Books Reborn as Intricate Art, below.
"By working with books, I want people to really look at the physicality, really look at the architecture and the structure of the information that we have had experiences with in the past and really question what's happening now that information is losing its physicality, losing its tangibility..." Brian Dettmer
· Don't miss: Altered Book Sculptures, Su Blackwell, American Crafts, and Callum Donovan.
Below is a CBS News piece on Brian, where you can get a peek at his Atlanta, Georgia studio and some works in progress.
Learn more about Brian at briandettmer.com and follow him on Instagram and Facebook. Check out more of Brian's sculpture photos on Flickr.
Below are 2 books about altering and upcycling objects into art - click through to see them on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases (at no extra cost to you).
Art Made From Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed by Alyson Kuhn and Brian Dettmer - A guide to the art form of excavating books to make artworks.
Raw + Material = Art: Found, Scavenged and Upcycled by Tristan Manco - This book explores art-making using unusual materials, such as paper, wood, straw, and bottles.
POPULAR POSTS
 Follow a tutorial for making a patchworked bag with Sashiko topstitching. |  Follow tutorials for how to create traditional Japanese embroidery stitching. |  Explore a library's digitized vintage maps, which you can download for free. |  Learn from a museum textile curator how to best care for your quilts. |
 Learn to make a basket weave pattern quilt from scraps of fabric. |  Sisters Lorna and Jill Watt create amazing yarn bomb installations . |  Ceramic artists create fantastical structures using magnetic clay. |  Learn about a Viking fabric-making technique which pre-dates knitting. |
 Follow a tutorial for making a bilum bag - PNG's traditional fabric. |  Learn to make a pinhole camera; develop paper film with common items. |  Learn about a stretchy fabric made with connected loops. |  Free digitized knitting magazines 1800 - now. |