Whereas heavy, hardcover reference books usually embody status and historic worth, the great volumes additionally carry an air of mental overload. Stuffed from cowl to cowl with intensive and sophisticated ideas, the tomes beckon the Paradox of Information, which states that the extra we be taught, the extra we understand how little we really know.
This vexing liminal house between the recognized and unknown is a driving drive for Barbara Wildenboer’s work. The Cape City-based artist (beforehand) sources secondhand books that span a variety of languages, worldviews, and topics resembling philosophy, artwork, historical past, music, biology, archaeology, and extra. Fascinated by linguistics and techniques of writing, Wildenboer goals to decode the ways in which we assign which means to symbols.
Scalpel and scissors in hand, Wildenboer transforms numerous guide pages into slim, capillary-like slivers that splay outward from the backbone. Via these symmetrical sculptures, the artist references different naturally mirrored types just like the mind’s left and proper hemispheres linked by the corpus callosum, the wingspan of the dying’s-head hawkmoth, and the Rorshach inkblot.
Wildenboer connects these formal qualities to the method of deciphering texts. Her biography notes, “she cuts through these dense and claustrophobic discourses, rendering them mute.” As a substitute, she alters books to the purpose that they’re not legible, remodeling the as soon as acquainted characters into new glyphs.
See extra from the artist on her web site and Instagram.
