Creatures large and small seem to have eaten their way out of the confinement of everyday items like rolling pins, axes, pianos and chairs in the hands of Montreal-based artist Maskull Lasserre. Previously known for his incredible skulls carved into the pages of books, Lasserre now reveals unexpected life (and death) within wooden objects.

Lasserre has carved crow skeletons, vulture skulls, rats, beetles and even a human ear out of found objects, often stacking more than one item together to produce the illusion that the sculpture is emerging from the wood. According to his CV, Lasserre’s sculptures “explore the unexpected potential of the everyday and its associated structures of authority, class, and value.”

“Elements of nostalgia, allegory, humor and the macabre are incorporated into works that induce strangeness in the familiar, and provoke uncertainty in the expected.”

In a two-part video interview with Liana Voia, Lasserre explains “When the remnants of life are imposed on an object, and that’s true especially with the carving work that I do, it infers a past history or a previous life that had been lived, so again where people see my work as macabre, I often see it as hopeful, as the remnants of a life.”

“Despite the fact that the life has ended, at least that life had a beginning and middle as well, so often by imparting these bodily elements to inanimate objects it reclaims or reanimates them in a virtual way.”

Fiction favorites, from Gone with the Wind to Treasure Island, literally leap off the pages in three dimensions in Jodi Harvey-Brown’s imaginative book paper sculptures. Harvey-Brown illustrates figures from the stories, cuts them out and sets them on top of the open books among paper trees, waves, castles and dragons.

The top sculpture is from ‘Knight and Dragon’, a book from the Dragonlance series. Harvey-Brown wired the knight and dragon through the book for extra stability. Above, a ship rises from the waves in the book ‘Kidnapped.’

Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer relax on a raft in the Mississippi.

Bambi and his mother explore the peaceful meadow just before tragedy strikes in one of the book’s most poignant scenes.

Pirates are poised above a chest full of gold and jewels in Treasure Island. See more of Harvey-Brown’s book sculptures, many of which are for sale, at the artist’s website.

Sculptor Guy Laramee looks at the edges of paper bound in a book and sees infinite possibilities: hills, valleys, volcanoes and alien rock formations. The artist is known for carving books into stunningly complex landscapes, with the scenes often inspired by the subject matter of his chosen materials.

In a new collection entitled ‘Guan Yin‘, Laramee meditates upon the fleeting nature of life. The series was inspired by two catastrophic events that occurred within days of each other, one that was very personal in nature and another that was experienced collectively by an entire nation and in fact, much of the world. The death of Laramee’s mother took on an extra layer of significance while the artist was still reeling from the tragic earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan.

“Everything we know, everything we did, everything we think we are, everything and everyone we love, all this will be wiped out. We would like to think that something will remain, culture, knowledge, or call it ‘life’ if you don’t want to call it God, but of this also, we have no certitude. ‘No certitude’ seems to be the only one we have, but even this is a concept, and concepts are the first thing to go down the drain, aren’t they?”

Some of the landscapes are lush while others are cold and harsh. Some feel like a continuation of Laramee’s previous work, including a series of hardcover encyclopedias written in both Chinese and English. The uniting theme that runs through all of Laramee’s art deals with the erosion of cultures as they emerge, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. Read Laramee’s artist statement and see more of his work at GuyLaramee.com.

via This is Colossal

As society shifts into the digital age, a lot of paper books are being left behind. Some courageous and green artists are fighting the tide by bringing these books back into their own as gorgeous works of art.

(Images via moolf, thespottedfox, thisisniceyeah, thespottedfox)

Thomas Allen uses careful book selection and a knife to create stunning photography setups that break out from the page.

(Images via puretextuality, designswan, gretascholtz)

This is how an artist brings a story to life. The detail is stunning – it would be amazing to have any of these on the bookshelf.

(Images via inspirationgreen, stuckattheairport, fadedandblurred, 1800recycling)

Artist Alex Queral carves into phonebooks to create incredible portraits with a literal depth to them.

(Images via chicagoartmagazine, thiscrazyweb, dyscario, magicworldimage)

Brian Dettmer and Alexander Korzer Robinson dig deep into the pages of colorfully illustrated books and create a diorama feel encased within the covers.

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Su Blackwell likes to create entire scenes that captivate. Her use of light makes her work seem otherworldly.

(Images via thechive, chroniclebooks, bookart, curatedmag)

Guy Laramee created an amazing cave in his work featured above, while Michael Carabetta’s work literally tunnels into a story, and can be found in art exhibits. Isaac Salazar brings one word to focus in his delicate book carvings. Su Blackwell’s work is under glass, and creates an intricate design.

(Images via izismile, manmadediy, eyeteeth, moolf)

The vintage books used by photographer and artist Thomas Allen allow him to create scenes that pull the viewer in.

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Artist Brian Dettmer is definitely one of the most prolific of the small group of book carvers who use this as their medium, and the intricacy of his work is astounding.

Why should out-of-date, unwanted books molder away in the dark corners of libraries, or – far worse – in a landfill? Artists working with books, whether they make it their sole chosen medium or just experiment once in a while, rescue these bound volumes of art and information and fold, cut, carve, glue, assemble or otherwise transform them into amazing sculptures and installations that honor or often transcend the meaning held within the pages.

Jill Sylvia

(images via: jillysylvia.com)

Jill Sylvia meticulously removes the blank entry blocks in ledger books and balance sheets, leaving behind nothing but delicate paper mesh. These geometric skeletons are then used to build amazing replicas of famous buildings like the U.S. Capitol and the White House.

Julia Feld

(images via: holystokes)

Favoring anatomy books, wildlife guides and instruction manuals, artist Julia Feld selectively removes parts of pages to leave behind layered collages, often left within the hardcover to resemble shadow boxes. She sells these intricate works at her Etsy shop, Holy Stokes.

Noriko Ambe

(images via: norikoambe.com)

Multidimensional and lush, the cut-outs by Noriko Ambe almost seem to have occurred simultaneously as part of some strange natural process.  Says Ambe, “Time is essential to my work. Because over time I add more and more paper to a sculpture, the work itself ends up embodying the time taken to create it. The process is as important as the finished product and the simple act of making art every day is important to my practice. Buddhism, although it’s not my intention to show this.”

Bronia Sawyer

(images via: broniart)

Birds, flowers, the waves of the ocean – all of these things and more are evoked simply by curling, folding and coloring the pages of books. Bronia Sawyer creates little paper worlds in which these animals seem to frolic and thrive. “A book is a magical thing, to look at a page of text at a glance gives no clue about its content, but to read the words brings a story to life, it opens your imagination’s floodgates and creates an invisible world in your mind which only you can see.”

Meg Hitchcock

(images via: meghitchcock.com)

Cutting words out of religious texts including the Bible, Koran and Torah, Brooklyn-based artist Meg Hitchcock creates these incredible collages “deconstructing the word of God.” Says Hitchcock, “I select passages from holy books and cut the letters from one passage to form the text of another. For example, I may cut up a passage from the Old Testament of the Bible and reassemble it as a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, or I may use type from the Torah to recreate an ancient Tantric text. A continuous line of text forms the words and sentences in a run-on manner, without spaces or punctuation, creating a visual mantra of devotion.”

Ariana Boussard-Reifel

(images via: arianaboussardreifel.com)

In her series ‘Between the Lines’, artist Ariana Boussard-Reifel has cut each and every word out of the pages of books, leaving behind only the white space, creating patterns that render the books meaningless – or do they?

Maria Fischer

(images via: maria-fischer.com)

Traumgedanken (Thoughts on Dreams) is a 76-page collection of literary, philosophical, psychological and scientific texts which provide insight into dream theories. Amazingly, German artist Maria Fischer has hand-sewn the pages with threads that tie images to certain keywords as sort of physical hyperlinks, which, Fischer says, visualize the confusion and fragility of dreams.

The artist explains, “In addition there are five pages where a significant excerpt from a text of the opposite page is stitched into the paper. It is not legible because the type’s actual surface is inside the folded page. This expresses the mysteriousness of dreams and the aspect of dream interpretation.”

Michael Bom

(images via: bomdesign.nl)

Designer Michael Bom turns books of all sorts into stunningly artistic lamps that retain the character of the book’s content. Some are simply opened, with the pages carefully spaced apart, to act as wall lamps; others are carefully cut and crafted to provide a variety of shapes. Between the pages a viewer can just barely glimpse images and text, which create interesting patterns of dark and light on the lantern surface.

Ann Hamilton

(images via: this is colossal)

Multimedia artist Ann Hamilton has occasionally worked with books throughout her 20-year career including projects in which she connected slices of books at the spine to form shapes as well as large-scale installations of stacked books. The installations form dense towers that, by virtue of the varying thicknesses of the books, take on a painterly quality when viewed from afar.

Alex Queral

(images via: projectsgallery.com)

Alex Queral carves faces into books of faceless names, producing three-dimensional portraits that reach deep within discarded phone books. Most are famous faces like PeeWee Herman and Bob Dylan; some are realistic, while others are crafted in an abstracted style. Queral uses an X-ACTO knife and a pot of acrylic medium to carve and set the books, and then applies a black wash to bring out the features.

Cara Barer

(images via: carabarer.com)

Sculptor Cara Barer bends, folds and curls the pages of unwanted books, sometimes coloring their edges, molding them into forms that suggest organic life like birds, insects and even the undersides of mushrooms. Says Barer, “With the discarded books that I have acquired, I am attempting to blur the line between objects, sculpture, and photography. This project has become a journey that continues to evolve.”

Yvette Hawkins

(images via: bookliciousblog)

From small folded paper pieces to installations of thousands of books that fill entire rooms, the art of Yvette Hawkins is inspired by forms in architecture, grids, maps and molecules as well as the geometric forms found in nature.

“The thing I love about paper is the idea that something so fragile and one dimensional can become structured and sturdy just by folding it. I actually started folding books because I wanted to manipulate the way printed words can be seen, so although i have always loved to work with paper, it was mark making and print that drew me to books.”