Carving 9 (2021)

Carving 9 (2012)
Jessica Drenk
Altered book and wax. H203 x W152 x D38 mm. Unique. Acquired from the Seager Gray Gallery, 10 February 2019.
Photo: Courtesy of the gallery.

Once a book becomes another material from which art can be made, the rectangular block offers itself up to an unbounded variety of treatments. It can be folded into something else. Or macerated and squeezed out, or into, something else. Or shot, burnt, frozen, soaked, coated or buried and dug up. Or torn, shredded and reconstituted or scattered. Or carved with any number of implements into any number of shapes.

But that oblong of material just lying there and the techniques of altering it are not usually sufficient starting points for the artist. In Jessica Drenk’s case, a visit to a botanic garden’s “large greenhouse full of hundreds of different succulent species” provided the necessary catalyst. As she explained in an interview with Patron: “It blew me away to see so much slight variety within the same category of plant and this experience sent me down a path of experimenting with books in the studio; I wanted to see how many different shapes and objects I could make out of the one material.”

In other statements, she refers to “an inquiry into materiality”, “conceptual alchemy”, “meanings becom[ing] transmuted”, “subversion of meanings”, the “connection between the man-made and the natural” and “specimens of the present”. So, clearly her initial curiosity about what could be made “of the one material” developed beyond that early catalyst. Inspired by shapes, textures and composition found in nature, Drenk combines several techniques of alteration to re-present it as a piece of “our own natural history” and “[remnant] of our culture”. She classifies the resulting works in an open series called “Reading Our Remains”, which appeared in her solo exhibition States of Matter in Dallas, October-December 2017, Galleri Urbane, Dallas, Texas.

Reading Our Remains series: works made of altered books. © Jessica Drenk.

Prior to the 2017 exhibition, Drenk’s Carving 12 was part Yale University Art Gallery’s 2014/15 exhibition Odd Volumes : Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection (which led to the acquisition of Carving 9 for the Books On Books Collection). Among the dozens of other altered books present was Brian Dettmer’s The Volume Library (2010), mentioned here to draw attention to the differences in effect of similar techniques.

From Odd Volumes : Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection (2014), p. C219. Credit for photo in the book: © Brian Dettmer.

Folding this illustrated encyclopedia back on itself with all of its pages glued together, Dettmer used a scalpel to carve into the “block of book” and have its images appear simultaneously and superimposed. It harks back to the pop-up and tunnel books of the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas those precursors were meant to be viewed from a fixed perspective, Dettmer’s work is meant to be viewed in the round, emphasizing the book’s object-hood in contrast to its original function and needling the original’s visually flat nature and even its then current usefulness and viability. (Given the nature of his humor, Dettmer may also be needling while nodding to those “movable books” of yesteryear with his non-movable sculpture.)

In describing a later series called “Sheaf”, Drenk touches on her techniques used with the “Reading Our Remains” series:

by pouring hot wax on [the books], the paper becomes hardened, the colors of the paper change and deepen, and the pages become fused together. And on certain pages the hot wax makes the paper translucent, so you see the text written on both sides of the page at once. The whole process is about dismantling the sensical and logical order of thoughts written on the pages and reordering it all in a way that flows aesthetically. (Patron, 2023)

Whereas Dettmer subverts the visual encyclopedia by facetiously turning it inside out (even with the title The Volume Library), sealing it solid, and carving it into a beautiful joke of itself, Drenk subverts an unidentified found book by sealing it solid, carving it into a merely numbered but beautiful fossil of itself and, with her series title, somberly inviting us to read the book’s (our) remains. Similar, different and both undeniable works of art.

Further Reading

Chasanoff, Allan, Pamela Franks, Jock Reynolds, and Andrew Hawkes. 2014. Odd Volumes : Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery.

Drenk, Jessica. Artist’s statements at artist’s website and Paia Contemporary Gallery.

Haining, Peter. 1979. Movable Books : An Illustrated History. London: New English Library.

Patron. 24 August 2023. “Mundane into Magic with Jessica Drenk“. Patron.