The Mystery Book Artist of Edinburgh has delivered by post a third sculpture in a bird-inspired series to the Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust (EUCL). For aficionados of the MBAE, the EUCL site provides the most comprehensive source to date of links and media on the artist’s work. As well, the MBAE’s Twitter address can be found there.
With the third piece, the artist has taken her work to the brink of didacticism, sentimentalism and “good works.” As much as one may applaud the literacy movement, its message weighs heavily, albeit it cleverly, on the feathers delicately sculpted from book pages and the paperclip body stored in a stickered cardboard travel chest along with a miniature copy of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds and Other Stories, a small beaked and goggled flight helmet, a flight map and instructions on how to assemble the sculpture. It is perhaps the instruction sheet that leaves the brink behind as one reads the hortatory UNESCO-ese shown here.
(c) Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust 2013
The instruction sheet promises more to come after this last in the “Preparing to Fly” series. What that “more” may be can be followed (chased?) @#freetofly on Twitter. At which point though, art seems to have flown the coop and left us up a “twee.”
Perhaps what the MBAE launches next will bring her body of work so far nearer to its roots (or roost?) in Joseph Cornell’s exquisite boxes.
Books On Books 