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.”