Alchemical may be an overused word in ceramics, but it’s hard to think of a better term to describe the process by which Emily Connell turns found and discarded books — many of them Bibles — into mysterious and beautiful works of sculpture. Each piece literally contains hundreds of thousands of words, but the artwork itself is entirely image-based, evoking the memory of language while transforming it into something new.
Connell begins by brushing each page with slip — a mixture of porcelain, water, and paper filaments added to provide stability to the pages. After firing the open book in a kiln, she submerges it in plaster to provide a sculptural encasement. The initial results turned out a little too abstract for her liking, and it wasn't until one of her professors at the Kansas City Art Institute encouraged her to “look inside” that she began to tap into the unique visual potential of each object. By cutting them open with a masonry saw, Connell is able to reveal a rich cross-section of shapes and designs, which she then isolates, juxtaposes or tiles to create a finished sculpture.
Within the plaster, the pages fan out in an ash and porcelain-covered “bloom," resembling a sliced-open vital organ embedded in eons of geological strata. The resulting patterns create a Rorschach test for the viewer — some see lip prints where others see flowers — but the qualities of a book are unmistakably present.
“I like that it pushes the boundaries of your ideas of what a book is,” Connell says. “I’m only using books that have been thrown away, so I feel like I’ve transformed them into something beautiful again.”
Connell titled the series “Vade Mecum,” which is Latin for “books of reference." Each sculpture becomes a reliquary for the books, as the ashes of each page are contained within the sculpture. The symbolic weight of utilizing scriptural texts is not lost on Connell, who was inspired by the rich tradition and vivid imagery that she was surrounded by during her Catholic school upbringing. The Bibles she uses are often earmarked, underlined or enclosed with prayer cards and personal ephemera, conveying the personal histories of their owners across time and space.
In the methodical, labor-intensive process of brushing each page, the reference books and dictionaries are treated to the same respect as the religious texts. With these types of books now largely replaced by technology, Connell's project acknowledges both their obsolescence and the non-linear fashion in which they were likely read — a ceremonial last turning of the pages before they are permanently suspended in time.
Each piece in the series contains its own unique qualities. In La Sacra Bibbia, a pairing of sculptures made from an Italian Bible, the smoke and ash were unable to escape their encasement, resulting in a fan of blackened pages that stand in vivid contrast to the pristine white plaster around it.
Those unpredictable elements in her work — and ceramics in general — are part of why Connell plans to keep experimenting with even larger hybrids of book art and ceramics.“You can control things to an extent, but you never quite know what you’re going to get,” she says. “Every time you open a kiln door you can be surprised.”
– Lucas Wetzel