A self-taught city artist turns discarded books into beautiful sculptures by merely folding their pages. A garland of paper blades adorns God at the entrance of Banoo Batliboi's house, announcing in its own way that the owner does not believe in cutting things. Inside, on the dining table, are books that can be judged by their hard, freshly dusted covers. These are second-hand books, chiefly condensed versions of Readers Digest volumes that stand daintily on the glass top, like little men with open arms, inviting you to see, relish and celebrate their sudden tangible promotion from discarded literature to exquisite fine art.
Paper craft artist Banoo Batliboi gives old and abandoned books a new lease of life by turning them into book sculptures. When a friend of noted lensman, Samar Singh Jodha, approached Banoo Batliboi to fashion a unique gift using Jodha's photo catalogue Phaneng, the Mumbai-based paper craft artist took it on as a challenge. "The catalogue contains portraits of reclusive Buddhist tribals and I wanted to highlight their faces through my craft. So I creased its pages to suggest the form of the dharmachakra, which represents the Eightfold Path in Buddhism."
Read Article ↗She gives books a new identity; call her the 'book makeover' if you like. But for Banoo Batliboi, working with books is "something I had to do, the moment I set eyes on a book sculpture". Batliboi is an altered book artist, the only one in the city and probably, the country. What does she do? She takes a book, folds its pages in different sizes and voila, you have a book sculpture. It's not as easy as it sounds though; a good book sculpture requires intense concentration and lots of practice.
Banoo Batliboi's book sculptures are more than just dexterous craft-pieces. They are page turners. "This is not a book", we can say about each of Banoo Batliboi's book sculptures. But it is, or at least, it was. It's not everyday you see the pages of a book turned in a way so it becomes unreadable, the type escaping into folds.
Read Article ↗With a natural inclination towards systems and patterns, Mumbai-based book sculptor Banoo Batliboi uses precision folding to achieve the conceptualised design. Using paper as her artistic medium, she has reinvented the visual structure of books without employing any cutting or sticking. As the book undergoes its transformation the text realigns itself with every fold to create a signature texture for her work.
Read Article ↗Ever heard of book art? Here is an artist who works in the unique genre. Art can be created out of anything. Even out of abandoned weathered books, like Banoo Batliboi does. She folds pages of books, thereby transforming the object completely, to create works of art that can be called book sculptures. Fashioning them out of such fragile material, the artist reinterprets them as delicate and solid sculptural and architectural forms at the same time — that too with minimal intervention.
Read Article ↗The artist discusses leather-bound books which inspired her collection. Celebrating books is in vogue. Artist Banoo Batliboi's tribute is to give forgotten books a new lease of life by transforming them into sculptures. Her sculptures in the group exhibition Collective Narratives have been crafted from 30-year-old, 22-carat embossed, leather-bound books from the Franklin Library Series.
Don't mistake this work for some sort of elaborate dog-earing. Banoo Batliboi's book sculptures require complex technical drawings and can sometimes take weeks to complete. Batliboi, who chanced upon the technique when she saw a book sculpture at someone's home about a decade ago, learned the craft herself, experimenting.
The artist behind the extraordinary book sculptures is Banoo Batliboi. Each piece is painstakingly created by hand. "I saw a book with folded pages and was immediately intrigued by it. I wanted to give my brother a present which was personal. The book idea then came back to me and I started experimenting with it."
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