Oh Pinterest, how I love thee – another day another inspiring piece of installation art! This time the artist is Wendy Wahl, who creates installation art pieces using recycled encyclopedias, world books, and dictionaries.
How cool are those? They’re like trees made of paper…how meta is that? Wendy talks about it as a process of “considering the associations between the tree of life, defined as the patterns of relationships that link all earth’s species and the tree of knowledge, defined as the connected branches of human thought realized in the form of writing and speaking.”
In addition to using the pages of these tomes as leafs or layers in her new trees, she also takes and rolls the pages in a repetitive way to create the cellular, growing pieces.
How cool does that look up close…it reminds me somewhat of the work of Amy Eisenfeld Genser, though her rolls are tighter and more varied in depth.
I wonder which book each side of this work is from. The yellowing and the graying must mean different consistencies of paper / ink I would think.
What’s also cool to me about Wendy is that she’s fairly local – she lives in nearby Rhode Island an teaches in continuing education at RISD amongst other things. I love learning about artists who work in general area, broadly speaking New England. It’s fun to learn about all the creativity flowing sort of near my back door.
These look like slinkies! I can’t help but wonder what her armature is for these sorts of pieces (if there is one) and what they weigh!
Paper, ink and blackened elm – I love the contrast in this piece, which is sort of different for Wendy’s overall portfolio. I can’t wait to keep my eye on her and see when she shows near Boston!
Tags: 3D, artists, installation, nature, paper, sculpture