Words and Beyond:The Book Re-Defined

There are three artists currently exhibiting books of a different kind in Rivier's Art Gallery in Nashua, New Hampshire. The books are experimental, layered with unusual and frequently natural materials, graphically pleasing, and emotionally and spiritually satisfying.



These expanded books beg to be touched and explored. I held my hands behind my back to resist the urge to pick them up. Their tactility was powerful, dominating my sensory experience so much, particularly in the Spirit Books made by Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord, that I felt tempted, drawn in, and pushed back all at the same time.

There is a fantasy to these pieces which are made from many natural forms including seeds, branches, handmade papers, and shells. Things we may love to touch while walking the beach, only to forget them when back in our busy lives. Here though, one is invited to meditate and the things easily ignored before entering the gallery, are now highlighted and placed nest-like, and in some cases, altar-like, before us. This compels us towards a sense of hush, honoring what might be prayerful.

In looking around the gallery further, Sandra Bowden's work also explores the sacred in perhaps a more literary way. There is a meticulous, careful approach to her paced work. Gone is the nature filled, wilder spaces of the Spirit Books, here gold leaf, copper and other shiny, precious materials find a setting where the scrawling line of text contrasts with the geometric shapes of the total works, drawing us closer to examine the slanted human presence of this writing. It is the sacred meeting minds with the profane, a balanced tight rope of form and sensuosity. These moments of text are visually beautiful, emotionally alive, and remember texts from past sacred works as they move into present time.




The gallery is softly lit in the extremities with directed lights on the books, adding a quiet, otherworldliness to the already strange space. Leon Steinmetz's works add further to this delightful, if sometimes unsettling world. The frenzy of his energetic, black line begs for the eye to emotionally follow and connect with the stories he suggests. They are powerfully theatrical works that call to mind some of the great masters such as Daumier and Rembrandt. Here, quirky, shaking, twisting, alive drawings ask us to journey with them.




Perhaps then, this is what I come away with; the sense of what an intimate space encourages, that the book shape we grow up with continues throughout our lives to carry a sense of connection with other hands and minds, however built, opened or viewed, and that it is our unique ability to feel, sense, and interpret that in turn connects artist to viewer and in the larger sense, to life.