A college student with (book) spine

Deanna Perez, the daughter of Carlos and Cynthia Perez of Lynbrook and a rising senior at Hamilton College, received an Emerson Foundation grant to create a book sculpture project. She is a graduate of Lynbrook Senior High School. 

When Deanna Perez looks at a bookshelf, she doesn’t just see a row of book spines — instead, she sees unwinding possibilities that can be unlocked both through reading and through art.

“There’s endless potential in what could be between the leaves of a binding,” Perez said. In her Emerson Foundation project, “The Life of a Book: From the Bindery to the Pedestal,” she is crafting sculptures out of books to explore their narratives and to examine the balance between destroying books and giving them a new life through art.

Using books that the Hamilton College library would otherwise discard, Perez is creating two large sculptures this summer. In the first, she is piecing together the hard covers removed from books, showing the spine, glue, and thread used in the binding. She aims to show the progression of the book from its birth, commenting, “It tells the story of a book that you don’t get from reading the pages.” For her other piece, Perez is focusing more on the written story. She is cutting out lines of text from books’ pages and weaving them together into long ropes. Eventually she will suspend these ropes, hoping to “create a forest of words that you can walk through.” She feels that this sculpture is reminiscent of “ideas unwinding from someone’s mind.”

Perez’s interest in book sculptures began when she took Professor Rebecca Murtaugh’s Introduction to Sculpture course. In a project titled “Turning Pages,” she created three pieces in which she modeled the extension of a person’s mind while reading a book. Her sophomore year, she continued with a series called “Unbound books,” in which she examined the relationship between the imagination and reading. Both of these projects featured intricate paper sculptures emerging out of open books. Perez affirmed, “Books are more than they appear when sitting on a shelf,” one of the key points she hopes that her art conveys.