Carving books into Romantic landscapes – Guy Laramee
Guy Laramee has been working and making his name in a number of fields. He is a stage writer, director, composer, a fabricator of musical instruments, a singer, sculptor, painter and writer. But what makes Laramée stand out and get really famous is his sculpture series carved out of books.
His sculptural works include two incredible and unusual series of carved book landscapes and structures entitled Biblios and The Great Wall, where the thick pages of old books are dug out in order to create tranquil mountains, ancient structures and high lands. His own words about these series are:
“So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. 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. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.”
According to him “knowledge is gained by erosion instead of accumulation”. And this is exactly what he’s showing to the world through his sculptural series. Laramée’s carved books are his representation of the deterioration of human culture. His way of expressing the devastation through which human culture is going.
