Essay Excerpt from the Contemporary Museum Biennial of Hawaii Artists Exhibition    

“As one who loves books, and the imaginative worlds to which book contents lure their readers, I am drawn to the physicality of the book, as familiar object, medium, and archetypal form.”

In a world in which books–-real books, of paper and board, text and image; that one can hold in the hand and enter with the mind–-may be members of an endangered category of objects, sculptor Jacqueline Rush Lee works to preserve the books she loves, or at least the idea of books, as portals to other worlds. Lee understands both the literal and symbolic power of the book, and the way it not only encodes knowledge but condenses time and space. 

Lee came to love books early in her life, and remembers making books and scrolls with her own stories as a child. It would not be until later in life that she would return to an engagement with books as something more than vehicles of information.

Intuitively drawn to the physicality of her materials, Lee has been able to learn quickly, through direct experience and experimentation, about the structural properties of things, and about their potential as vessels of meaning. Often, Lee’s approach is to push the technical aspects of a given medium, finding that she is as much guided by, as in control of, her materials. The occurrence of what might be considered accidents or mistakes are understood by Lee to be signposts that lead the way to new terrain.

In 1998, in an earlier series of work that also related to the book form, Lee employed the process of kiln firing, an integral aspect of work in ceramics, to transform individual books. Taken through a slow process of heating until reaching a high temperature in a reduction environment, expanding as the temperature rose, a book would not be burned to a pile of ash as one might expect but would be petrified, changed into a surprisingly stable though fragile structure that looked much like a pale ghost of its former self, sometimes even retaining traces of text. In her thesis exhibition Ex Libris, Lee subsequently took one of those petrified volumes and allowed it to slowly decompose in a tank of water, revealing another stage in the process of transformation. In the context of an exhibition that also included rubber casts of book spines (one of several ways in which book structure and human anatomy overlap), Lee’s use of the book form in its more ephemeral manifestations carried intimations of human memory and mortality.

In Volumes, another series of work developed for a solo exhibition in 2002, Lee created a series of large wheel-like circular forms in which old books (their covers removed for greater pliability) were bound tightly together like the concentric growth rings in sections of tree trunks. Soaked and then re-dried, the edges of these whorls of paper, sometimes stained with soft bleeding colors, would warp and unfurl. The cross-referential aspect of the work (much paper pulp coming from trees harvested for that purpose) would emerge as one of several ways in which book-as-subject, Lee’s formative processes, and the iconographic potential of her sculptures would become linked.

In these earlier series of works, Lee made use of old books, from fiction to encyclopedias, representing a broad range of subject matter that she regularly gathered mostly from library sales. For Lee, a lifelong lover of found objects of all kinds, these raw materials come already invested with a wealth of associations. Books are intimate objects, not simply by virtue of their scale, but because they have passed through the hands of so many others, known and unknown, who have perhaps in some way left a bit of themselves between the pages–-from a notation written in the margins, or a fragment of paper tucked inside, to something less tangible, but no less real. Books provide repositories for knowledge and history; they also contain their own histories of use. Entering a book involves a kind of archaeology of texts, of reading and readers.  

In developing Epic, her current series of work that includes three separate groupings, Lee has developed yet another way of working, a process of sculptural casting she calls “Impresco,” merging the connotations carried by the terms “impression” and “fresco.” Lee thus moves from books as printed matter to the residual imprints made by books in the casting process. Lee also brings into play the many associations linked to the term “scape,” which may connote an aspect of the natural environment, or something more abstract and conceptual.

In Epic: Impresco Scapes, Volume I, forty panels are arranged in a loose mosaic of images. Several panels are untitled; others carry evocative designations, including Obfuscape in shell pink, Zenscape, and Cloudscape for Anonymous. Epic: Impresco Scapes, Volume II is comprised of six panels that make more specific allusion to landscape, with horizontal bands of softly modulated color. Lee returns to the circular forms created earlier for the Volumes series from 2002, using a smaller-scale version to create the third section of Epic, twelve panels subtitled Sculpographies. Here the concentric rings of pages, visible in deep relief, suggest unusual geological formations, or aerial views of ancient craters.

Each panel, unique in its particular configuration, has been cast from parts of one or more books with the technique that Lee has developed. Within a shallow wooden box, she pours a layer of gypsum cement (hydrastone), a high-grade plaster material. Into that material, while still soft and wet, books are pressed: a stack of paperbacks tied together will leave a delicate linear imprint of their fore-edges; an unbound spine will transfer the pattern of its sewing; an old cover, bound in red bookcloth, will bleed slowly as it reacts with the wet plaster. When the plaster has set up, the books can be removed, leaving behind their concave imprints, and perhaps a bit of color, a layer of paper, or threads from frayed binding. These residual images, within the frame of cool white plaster, have an elusive but compelling aura, like the poignant memory of a dream, or the visual echo of a half-remembered poem. Each by itself has an exquisite intimacy; together they form a kind of open-ended narrative, a musing on things we have possessed and lost, and things we have let go, only to have them return in another time, another form. 

                                                                                                                                    Marcia Morse, 2005

ON PROCESS

I consider myself an experimental artist who works decisively and intuitively between the borders of craft and fine art to create sculptures informed by personal and art historical ideas. I am a sculptor whose primary medium has been the book form for almost twelve years. I transform used books into art works that create new narratives by applying processes to transform physically and metaphorically.

Many of the techniques that I employ are informed by both traditional and non-traditional artistic practices. I am interested in mainly utilizing the pure components inherent in the books themselves, such as inks, covers, pages, book marks, book headbands--and scrambling the formal arrangement of them. I am interested in the fact that the books have been lovingly handled, marked and cared for by another hand and I hope to enhance these qualities through my finished works.

While I wrote, illustrated, and even constructed my own books for many years as a child, my first experiment with working with books occurred in 1997 when--as a ceramics graduate--I fired a book in a kiln as an experiment and was struck by the poetic, otherworldly quality of the form. I felt that this work re-introduced me once again to a medium that has been a rich source of inspiration for me for as long as I can remember.

Ex Libris 1998 – 2000 “Petrified Books”
In Ex Libris I developed a process to fire books in a kiln without clay slip so that they would be preserved in their pure, transformed state, unmasked by a clay surface additive. Used books were fired in a controlled kiln environment and transformed into fragile, though stable art forms that were reminiscent of scholar’s rocks, coral or skeletal remains. Hundreds of books were fired to explore this process after the first book that I fired had such a poetic and otherworldly presence. Once fired the books were no longer recognizable in their usual context, but were transformed into poetic remnants of their former selves, suggesting a trajectory of time, transformation and memory.

Volumes 2001-2003
This body of work transitioned out of my Ex Libris series inspired by an artwork entitled Shelf Life. During my Ex Libris working process I had wet some of the books to see if it made a difference during firing, and was struck by the poetics of the bleeding inks of the book edges. Thus, in Volumes I continued to use water to transform the books so that the dyes of the book fore-edges would bleed and the pages warped into beautiful, curled striations—a theme that has continued into my work today. The books were then dried thoroughly and wound around themselves in continuous layers and matched edge to edge to create geometric structures that alluded to natural, organic forms. Each of the art works were made completely out of books, and “sealed” with the covers placed around them. In all of my works titles make allusions to open-ended ideas in which the viewer can construct ideas or project their own personal stories into the books.

Epic 2003 – 2005
Book covers, fore edges and spines have been embedded into gypsum cement; then removed, leaving behind permanent colour stains. I call each of the panels from this installation Imprescoes; a merging together of the words “imprint’ and “fresco.” This work was created as a response to my Mother’s death in 2003. Upon reflection, the marginalia and hand-worn discarded books that I came across in my work were symbolic of what was intimate, precious, and forever lost. As a body of work some themes carried over from Volumes in which the dyes of the books were manipulated to create an instant paint palette of sorts. Although not clear to me at the time Epic continued with this theme, which I interpreted as a happy accident. Stripped book covers, spines and fore edges when cast into gypsum cement, left soft, painterly stains when removed from the gypsum.

Specifically, within this process, a heat transfer takes place when pigments and dyes from the book covers, edges and spines naturally “bleed” into the curing gypsum. In my mind, an almost animistic transference of the hands and spirits of those who had previously possessed the books; moments frozen in time within the permanent medium of the bas-relief fresco.

Devotion Series 2007 - present
These works are based on Medieval devotional books with a pondering of what contemporary devotional books might look like or allude to metaphorically. Books are painstakingly hand-painted with inks, page by page, and the forms are manipulated in order to transform the form and content of the final work. I am interested in the challenge of utilizing only the pure components of a book such as its pages, covers, inks, book marks, book head bands and creating minimalist forms with substance.
I like to think of these sculptures as “having been engulfed by the inks from their inner texts.”

Paintures 2007 – present Sculptures inspired by gesture drawing and painting   
These art works evolved as a playful respite from the labour-intensive task of building sculptures out of hundreds of layers of paint (Chromascapes 2007). While building sculptures out of paint was interesting to probe but, ultimately not the most practical and satisfying activity for me; that body of work led to the creation of the Paintures.

Reminiscent of the creative and make-do aesthetic of Folk and Outsider art, the Paintures are created from paint "skins" and paint scrapings affixed to scrap metal armatures. I like to think of them as being like abstract paintings that have jumped off of the canvas to become 3D figurative works......

Jacqueline Rush Lee