Far from the Museum of the Bible, These Artists Use the Good Book as Their Medium

In 2015, Montreal-based artist Guy Laramée placed a large-format Bible from the 19th century upright with the spine open. Then, using a power grinder, he carved a landscape into the pages and painted along the curvatures, evoking the space of a cave whittled into a sheer mountainside.

It is a beautiful summoning of desert spaces, conjuring the place of the biblical prophets. It is, however, an unusual treatment of the Good Book. 

And it is one that would never find its way to the $500 million Museum of the Bible, opening Friday (Nov. 17)  in Washington, D.C. That museum is dedicated to the preservation and presentation of the sacred text through the ages.

Laramée, along with a number of contemporary artists, has been working with books not as muse, but as medium. You could call these artists book lovers, but only in the way that you could call Michelangelo a marble lover or Edward Scissorhands a tree lover. 

The trade-offs involved in this sort of love become much more stark when the book in question is someone’s version of sacred scripture. 

Artists such as Carole Kunstadt, Islam Aly and Jan Owen create their own sacred books, stitching together pages of handmade papers in creative ways, writing their own poems and prayers or carving symbolic designs out of the pages. The finished product is like a book yet also like a piece of sculpture….