Heather Beardsley
  • Home
  • Recent Projects
    • Distorted Depths
    • Strange Plants, Textiles
    • Strange Plants, Embroidered Photos
    • Strange Plants, Boxes
  • 2019
    • Folding City
    • Shangyuan Art Residency
    • Once I Had...
  • 2018
    • Ectopic Anatomy
    • Fictive Fossils
    • Fiber Cyanotypes
  • 2017
    • Fabulatory Epistemology
    • Die Sammlung
    • Dissolving Grids
    • Here Be Dragons
    • Batiks
  • 2016
    • Mapping Migrations
  • 2015
    • Taxonomy
    • Institute for the Study of Fabulatory Epistemology and Fantasy Football
  • 2014
    • Lab Notebook
    • Continuous Drawing
  • 2013
    • Books
    • OCD Drawings
    • Specimen Vials
  • CV
  • About
  • New Page

Books

Books fascinate me as a material because they function so well as a metaphor for the body. Cutting into these books feels surgical as I open them up, remove what I consider the unnecessary and then glue them back together again. The
small parts that make up a book build on each other to create larger systems, which together form the whole. Letters are put together to create words, strung together to make sentences, arranged into paragraphs to be formed into chapters that become a book. When I cut into the pages of these books the sentences become mangled as words and letters are dissected. By reducing the book to its most basic elements I am reiterating its connection to the imagery I am carving into it. I choose reference books written to educate people about their bodies to create these pieces, but I remove the content of these books and replace it with my own.  This subverts the text and highlights the gaps in knowledge that still exist concerning the human body.   All the books I use are second hand, and the wear and tear exhibited on them reflects the ravishes of time and the weariness of age.