Paper and Book Carving . . .

. . . as opposed to paper or book cutting, like, say, Brian Dettmer. Kylie Stillman's work uses a book or stack of books as though it were a block of marble, but she engraves rather than sculpts. Her most recent work involves stacks of books or paper, but her earlier pieces are fairly simple images of birds carved into the text block of a book, hidden by the closed cover, or (and I love these!) hand-laced venetian blinds. (Click image at right for enlargement.)

Her book stack carvings remind me of the elaborate fore-edge paintings in their distortion of the book. In this case, instead of fanning the book to create a canvas, she disregards the boundaries of the book, like covers, to make a sculptural surface. Last year, she moved into the monumental by carving a bookcase of books and a gigantic stack of paper. Her images are of the natural world—birds and trees—as though reminding us where her materials come from and how artificial they are. In that sense, you could look at the tree carvings as tombstones. The piece above looks almost ghostly when you think of it that way.

[Via the newish design blog Arctic Oak, which is worth checking out too.]