Wax Books
As long as I can remember, books have been a big influence in my life, an inspiration even, and most of all a consolation. Words evoke images.
Stimulated through literature, I learned to see not only through my eyes but also through thoughts. The two ways of seeing, physical and mental, complete the power of perception. I began to transform books into objects, containers of literature sealed in bees-wax marked and with images suggested to me while reading them.
Amazing to me is that our civilization is now storing the documents containing its ideas and thoughts in new digital media that will last only a fraction of a human lifetime (15-20 years). With time, digital information fades, as all things do. But when the integrity of a computer file is broken, then one may see either nothing or incomprehensible garbage, not a page gracefully vanishing.
A modern house becomes dehumanized when its books are replaced by electronics. The electronics display a trivial immediacy that always occurs within the same, unchanging frame. And because the accumulation of objects, and especially books, are the expression of memory, the superimposing of past and present, I feel that the time we are living in is murdering Proust.
D. W. Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst, theorized that artists are people driven by a conflict between the desire to communicate and the even stronger desire to hide. These enclosed books are not only the antithesis of the digital age, they are also packages of personal interpretation that simultaneously reveal and obscure what the books actually contain.
Veronika Anita Teuber