A Humane Turtle

I love books. I love reading books, experiencing the beauty that lies in the stories they tell. But I also love the mere availability of books, experiencing their visual and tactile presence. Yes, I am one of the people possibly cursed by bookstore owners because they like to sort their books by color or size (and yes, I did buy a few books just because I liked the cover).

So I’m always mesmerized when I see artists that use books as the base material for their sculptures. Here’s a list of book artists and cut/carved art works that I find especially beautiful. I found most of them via blog posts on My Modern Metropolis and Brain Pickings.

Nicholas Galanin: Faces

American artist Nicholas Galanin combines traditional and contemporary art in his work. With a Master’s degree in Indigenous Visual Arts from Massey University in New Zealand, he integrates indigenous culture into his work. The above works, he says, “retain the elegance of traditional masks, but their contemporary forms have an eeriness, a feeling of being there and not there – perhaps because of their pale color, their blurry, almost shrouded, features, and their seemingly sightless eyes. And, just as they seem to be materializing from the book’s pages, they also hover on the point of dissolution. There is an implication that they will never fully take form – resulting in a haunting sense of loss and longing.”

Wim Botha: The Human Condition

Wim Botha, a South-African artist, creates large-scale sculptural installations out of books, carved from dictionaries, bibles, encyclopedias, and also wood. He combines them with other everyday and symbolic objects, to create works with a whole new symbolic character. Very powerful artwork that I’d love to experience in person.

Kyle Kirkpatrick: Miniature People in Book Landscapes

On his profile, the UK-based artist Kyle Kirkpatrick states: “My practice is primarily concerned with the notion of the imagined landscape. I present man-made objects and natural materials simultaneously to form carefully and meticulously composed installation works. I capitalize on intrigue taking objects out of context reinventing their use, pushing the viewer to see beyond what I present before them.”

Guy Laramee: Book Landscapes

The artist from Montréal carves elaborate mountains out of big encyclopedias. He says: “Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS.”

Alexander Korzer-Robinson: Encyclopedic Storybook Art

I really like the approach that the British artist Alexander Korzer-Robinson has: he carefully cuts out parts of image-rich books like encyclopedias, so that what you see is a layered composition of the book’s illustration. A brilliant idea!

Brian Dettmer: Book Surgery

Having gushed about Korzer-Robinson, the Atlanta-based artist Brian Demetter uses a similar approach, but takes it to a whole new level. Images and words from within the book come to the fore; in addition, he shapes the whole book in such a way that it becomes a whole new entity. Simply stunning!

Su Blackwell: Scenic Storytelling

The London-based artist Su Blackwell creates incredibly beautiful artwork within the realm of fairy-tales and folklore. “For the cut-out illustrations,” she says, “I tend to lean towards young-girl characters, placing them in haunting, fragile settings, expressing the vulnerability of childhood, while also conveying a sense of childhood anxiety and wonder. There is a quiet melancholy in the work, depicted in the material used, and choice of subtle colour.”

Honorable Mention: Book Planters

Last, but not least, here’s an idea for a DIY book carving project: make planters out of books. There is a few tutorials around, for example at Green Wedding Shoes and Apartment Therapy. If you end up making some, let me know!

Another thing I made for Global Village (see previous post) is a rendition of Linzertorte, a crumbly dough torte with a lattice design on top, named after the Austrian city Linz.

Here’s what I used:

• 250g flour
• 150g ground roasted hazelnuts
• 100g ground almonds
• 10g baking powder
• 150g sugar (typically powdered sugar, I used Muscovado sugar)
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• a pinch of clove powder
• 200g milk-free margarine
• egg replacer powder for one egg (in Norway, you can buy it at e.g. Rema1000 or Meny)
• jam (typically redcurrant; I used rosehip)

Mix the dry ingredients; then quickly knead in the margarine. (If you knead it for too long, the dough is going to break when you try to roll it out.) Put it in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Grease a cake pan. Roll out about 3/4 of the dough, and put it in the pan. Make the dough a little higher around the edge. Spread it a little with your fingers, if necessary. Then spread the jam over the dough, maybe half a centimeter high. Roll out the rest of the dough, cut it in stripes, and put the stripes in a lattice design on top of the jam.

Bake it at 180°C for 20-30min. The Linzertorte tastes best if you let it rest over night first. Enjoy!

Last Friday, we celebrated the multi-national culture at Opera Software with a Global Village, an event where employees served samples of traditional foods from their native countries. I’m the only Austrian at Opera, so I got to choose what to serve on my table.

I grew up in the Pongau  district of Salzburg (Salzburg is both the city and one of Austria’s 9 states), in the middle of the Alps. A very typical dish for the region is ‘Pongauer Fleischkrapfen’, a sort of meat dumpling, typically made with smoked meat. So for Global Village, I created a modern rendition of the dish. It is 100% vegetarian, though I must warn you: that doesn’t make the dish much lighter.

The recipe is for 6-8 people. Fleischkrapfen take quite a bit of time to prepare, so it does make sense to make a bunch. The good thing is that you can make them in stages. I did it like this:

• Day 1: prepare the filling
• Day 2: make the dough and make the Krapfen
• Day 3: deep-fry the Krapfen

The measurements are not very exact, since I usually cook by approximation rather than by book.

The Filling

• ~100g TVP (Textured vegetable protein)
• 2 blocks of smoked tofu (the smokier the better)
• 2 onions
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 large potato, cooked
• vegetable stock
• soy sauce
• vegetable frying oil
• herb salt, pepper
• parsley

Cover the dry TVP with boiling water, add a dash of soy sauce, a whole bunch of vegetable stock, and herb salt. The liquid should be a lot saltier than the usual vegetable broth. Let the TVP rehydrate for a couple of minutes (the package will tell you how long exactly). Mince the smoked tofu and mash the potato. When ready, drain the TVP and press it with your hands to remove all excess liquid.

Finely cut the onions and fry them in oil until lucent. Then add some more oil, the TVP and the tofu, and roast for a little while. Then add the rest of the ingredients (potato, crushed garlic, spicery). To make it taste authentic, make sure to use a whole bunch of oil and salt. The filling shouldn’t taste dry. Let the filling cool down before you use it. Ideally, leave it over night, so the TVP can take on some of the smokiness of the tofu.

The Dough: “Abbrennteig”

• 250g wheat flour
• 250g rye flour
• ~ 250ml unsweetened plant milk (e.g. soy milk or oat milk)
• 100g milk-free margarine
• 1 tsp ground caraway
• salt (1 tbs?)

We call this dough “Abbrennteig” (burn-up-dough?). The idea is to ‘burn’ the flour with the hot liquid, so it thickens immediately. It can be a little tricky to get the amount of liquid right, since you shouldn’t have to add too much flour or cold liquid later on. The dough should be hard enough so it doesn’t stick and is strong enough to hold in the filling. If it is too hard, it will be tough to roll it out.

To make the dough, mix the dry ingredients. Boil up the milk and margarine, then mix the hot liquid into the dry ingredients. Knead a little and let the dough rest for a little while, so it can cool down. (I had it rest over night even, covered with plastic foil).

The Krapfen

• Cooking oil for deep frying (I used coconut oil)

Take a bit of the dough and roll it out thinly, around 15cm in diameter. Put filling on the lower half of the circle, and fold over the other half. Make sure there’s no extra air in the pocket. Press the edges shut with your fingers, leave around 1cm of edge; you don’t want the Fleischkrapfen to open up while you deep-fry them. Cut off excess dough with a pastry wheel.

If you end up with leftover dough (or if you want a simpler/faster dish), roll out the dough and cut it into large squares. The deep-fried squares are called “Blattlkrapfen” (leaf krapfen). We’d usually wrap them with Sauerkraut and eat them with our hands.

Deep-fry the Fleischkrapfen (brown them a little on both sides), and put them on kitchen roll paper to remove extra fat. Serve them immediately, together with sauerkraut. Good luck!

The process of decorating my apartment is a slow one. I want every part of it to be special. I want to have a positive connection to the items I own, and not own too much of them. So I want to put some effort into the decoration I put up, without spending much money on it.

When I saw the family tree on All Things Paper, I knew I wanted to make something similar myself. As in the original project, I used toilet paper rolls for the leaves and cardboard for the branches, but I also used cardboard instead of photo frames. I made mine purple (because purple is awesome), with some black shadows and golden highlights. Finding the right pictures is still work-in-progress

The tree with pictures.

Before I put pictures up.

Detail.

Time for another upcycling project!

So I have this big-ass dining table in my apartment, extendable to fit at least 6 people. I finally tested it in its extended form last week, when I had people over for the UX book club. There was only one problem: It was empty. I had no decoration for it whatsoever. Well, I have candles, but one tiny candle on a big table doesn’t really do much. So I decided, in a cloak-and-dagger operation, to dig through my paper trash and make something out of it.

I ended up using just three paper bags – the ones bread comes in. I opened them up into one flat layer, and colored them with acrylic paint: two with purple paint and white highlights, one with golden paint. Then I cut 2cm wide stripes, and wove them together. I glued all the overlaps. Voila!

Oh, and for the white part I cut three circles out of a white plastic bag, cutting around a pot with a Stanley knife. I stuck them together in the middle using double-sided tape. Then I added a simple line of golden acrylic paint.

The reverse side of the paper part looks like this:

The bread was a little oily, that’s why there are some dark spots

I didn’t document the process, so I can’t give you a step-by-step guide. But maybe you can tell by looking at the leftovers. Here you go!

And now the final frame:

Yes, it is the typical tirade
The trouble letting go

No more Melody, or dreams of D
No more Home outside of me

While I cherished what we tried to make
I never got the flow

Ah, heck, I wish I could just turn my back
And leave it all behind

The bad, the good, the dearth of time
The things I couldn’t find

No more masquerades, no fait accompli
No closets with no room for me

The irony in all of this:
While having what is most alike
Myself I could but miss

Christmas is the one time of the year where I get to see family, where all siblings are back home at the same time. That is what Christmas is for me: family time.

I recently shared a bunch of ideas on how to make gift wrapping out of trash. I wrapped another set of gifts today. While the first set was made of trash I found in my apartment in Oslo, I had to find stuff around my parents’ house this time round.

One thing to look for is shopping bags. Some stores have bags with awesome designs, and they work really well for gift wrapping.

The paper bag of the local supermarket reads “Everything is going to be alright.” Isn’t that perfect for gifts? All I had to do was add some details: some birds, and the gift card as dot on the i.

For this gift I used a plastic shopping bag. The blue handle worked surprisingly well as decoration.

I have tons of reinforcement rings that I haven’t used for ages. Well, until today, that is. I used them to make a hole-y tree The ribbon is made of the material that the rings came on. No waste at all!

A CD wrapped in CDs, is that possible? I say yes! Cutting CDs is a bit messy though, I added tape around the edges to prevent additional mess. For this particular wrapping, I used old Knoppix 5 and Kubuntu 6 installer CDs. I will not miss them.

I also found a piece of a shirt that I had cut up for another project. The leftover I found was the bit around the shoulder. The seam there makes a nice line in the final wrapping. I added color with a stitched star and the stitches around the edges. I tried backstitch for the bottom edge, but I changed to  straight stitch for the other two edges. It made the wrapping easy to open, and the reverse side looked much nicer.

So far, I had used paper and plastic trash, but I hadn’t used food scraps yet. I decided that tangerine zest and and nutshells where both available without end and perfect for the season. And they look nice, don’t they?

For the last gift I didn’t experiment much with new materials. Well, I hadn’t used paper towels before (and no, I didn’t take those out if the trash – I used new ones). But this gift isn’t really about the materials; it is about the looks. It’s a double-cream hazelnut cake with a whole bunch of cream topping. Yum!

Almost a month ago I posted about my white-board Advent calendar project, the Creepy Creature Calendar. Thanks to Claudio I know that this technique is called exquisite corpse (check out this exquisite book!).

24 days later the calendar is all filled out, thanks to my colleagues at work. It was a fun experience, and I think this has potential to become a tradition. The creature has lots of eyes, a bunch of heads and feet, and there is a bird. Also, the creature is (at least partly) female, and she is exploited for her milk.

Here is an animation of how she came into being:

I started taking a picture every day, but my phone got stolen, so I had to create this progress animation from the last photograph.

Here are pictures of some of the creepy creature’s features:

The cross-eyed siamese teddy bear.

Swinging udder.

Arms and legs and… the creature is reset to 0. Or something

The peaceful bird, scratching into the heart-adorned arm.

Mr. Floating Pumkin, and Mr. Angry Meat-Eating Plant.

“I’m in the middle but nobody likes me”-dude.

Eye-tongued trident-armed dragon head, aiming to kill that bug.

Thanks to the following people who participated in this fun little project:

1. Espen
2. Erle
3. Esteban
4. Tommy
5. Daniel
6. Øyvind H.
7. Axel
8. Arjan
9. Petter
10. Oleg
11. Thomas
12. Øyvind Ø.
13. Yenny
14. Anders
15. Karianne
16. Helge
17. ?? (a mystical person who participated over the weekend)
18. Stein Cato
19. Tony
20. Roar
21. Arne Martin
22. Alex
23. Eirik
24. Aleksei

Update: I posted a part two now.

The other night I wrapped some gifts for loved ones. I’m not the wrapping paper kind of person though. When it comes to wrapping gifts, I want to recycle as much as possible. But I still want gifts that look nice! So, most of the materials I used I took from the paper trash. For books, I often used parts of the packaging they were shipped in. Here are some detailed shots of the gifts:

For the first gift I used the original packaging and painted it with acrylic paint.  I like the purple (front) side much better than the back.

Here I also used original packaging, added stripes of old printouts  and a picture I found in an old magazine.  Then I added some gold paint to make it look a little fancier.

Here I cut up a toilet paper roll as decoration.

I wrapped one gift in a magazine ad. The ad was about organic products (not all vegan, unfortunately). The card is a piece of a pasta carton. I put it all together with rubber bands.

Old bags from a local deli and a bit of string make nice gift wrapping, too. The card is made from a piece of a tea box.

And last but not least: bits of cardboard  make Tetris-style gift wrapping (card included).