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Siegrid Müller-Holtz     Germany                         Statement

Transformation of books into another language of form  Current working method 2019

 In this age of digitalisation, books can be found gathering dust and developing a patina while stacked in every bookcase, antique shop, flea market, library and private home. I work serially with old and discarded books using collage technique. Antiquarian books with yellowed and mould-stained pages hold a special charm for me. The books I transform into a new and modern pictorial art form are given to me as a gift. The recycling aspect is incorporated here.

   Book fragments Book-text collages serial "Preserving the old"

                                           Book recycling in art                                 abstract – poetic – contemporary – modern

Under my hands, the medium BOOK transforms into a visual-artistic design vocabulary with a narrative character.
The book is no longer experienced as an illustration of a linguistically fixed history, but its characteristic features open up as a haptic image collage through the use of book covers, spines, bindings and endpapers. Merging the elements transforms the book into narrative art, interspersed with original handwritten texts/sayings/quotations from another century, taken from friendship albums from around 1870, poetry albums from around 1910 or other antiquarian documents and writings. The original book is broken down into its constituent parts. It is lent a new figurative character
 Uprooted text occupies the pictorial space in the form of full text, word fragments, book and text fragments, symbols and signs. The individual manuscripts in Sütterlin script, used until around 1910, and the yellowed papers that show traces of ageing lend the collages something mysterious. They place the material BOOK in a new charged pictorial relationship and look back on a different era. They are documents from a time that was then. Words, characters, symbols and text elements that set accents can still be partially read. They lend the collages something mysterious. The original book no longer exists.

 Tapping into the composition is left up to the beholder. It is not the book-text collage itself that narrates a clear story. Instead, it actively offers the beholder the opportunity to recreate a story, to construct or revive individual memories, experiences or retrospectively narrated stories from, perhaps, their own family.
The exhibits have deliberately not been individually titled.

©   Siegrid Müller-Holtz November 2019

 Book fragments       composition collage, mixed techniques on canvvas or card board  finished size 30 x 30          Serial working method from 2019