Patience, but no hesitation
How Conny Goelz-Schmitt makes art from vintage books
Books – the physical objects, not the Kindle phantoms – are dream boxes. Hold one on your lap: It seems contained, solid. A cover, a spine; cloth and glue; threads and paper and ink. Open it, and be carried away into other worlds.
Conny Goelz–Schmitt builds her sculptural collages from the boards, and fabrics of vintage books. Her works embody the pleasures and memories of a deep read – the tactile delights of books, and the unpredictable ways stories fan out and unravel. Conny had work in The Cut Up at Bernay Fine Art in Great Barrington, which just closed.
In an artwork, the material of books, like the material of the built environment, evokes the richness of the life it holds inside. It triggers associations. Conny’s sculptures immediately bring me to worn editions of novels I came across during regular visits to a cozy old library atop many stone stairs in the beach town where my family summered when I was young. The touch of the woven covers. The patterns inside them. The deckled pages, the slight impression of the typography on the paper.
Conny had similar experiences. “I grew up immersed in books,” she wrote in an email. “They were my vice, the way I ‘wasted my time,’ something even considered ‘useless.’ I loved them so much that they became my escape, yet also a kind of letdown, since the stories always ended and left a hole in my heart. At one point I even imagined devouring them.”
Now, in a way, she does devour them. Her sculptures crack open those old dream boxes and invite them to speak in new ways. Who knew they had another language, shapely and formal and stretching open like accordions, unfolding like origami? The narratives are gone, but the bones remain, and they rise and dance. This may be a new language, but in it old books speak – if you’ll permit a pun – volumes.
Conny writes:
When I began “destroying” books for collage, I felt completely out of my comfort zone.
