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Fiction Books in Action 5' x 4'
Mohamed-Saeed Omer
(see more by this artist)
Artist statement
I was a young child when my interest in the shape and mass of books started to grow. I grew up in a house full of books. My father, who is a linguist kept books everywhere in our house. At the same time one of my uncles had a bookshop at our street corner. As children, my brothers and I used to help in the shop after school and in the summer time. I used to move books, magazines, and newspapers while helping in the shop. That created another experience and relationship with books. By the time I was nine, I had learned a simple technique of making hard covers for some of my father's books. At this point, I started questioning the form, dimensions, and sizes of books. I touched hundreds of books. By age twelve, I had mastered the technique of books binding.
I look at books not only as containers that carry letters, words and information. Yes, books are respected and valued for their function, their content or their historical and ritual values. But they also have individual physical features in addition to their contextual value. For example, books have bodies and a backbone; they also have joints that balance the sides of the book and give them support while allowing them to bend. Most books have a symmetrical shape that allows them to curve or roll, fold or twist. Such features are linked mostly to living things and are not found in many other objects.
Books were living things one day, when they were trees. Through my work I look at books concerning the relationship between art and science, creation and evolution. Books got their present physical features by evolving through the time from being rocks. Rocks were once a molten magma that slowly cooled to become the surface for us to live on. Rocks, then, were the first surface that could hold readable knowledge and information. The first surfaces that people used for documentation were rocks or stones. These relations between documentation and identification, between books and rocks, rocks and trees, trees and life, and indeed shape and function became the focus of my intention of making this work. Thus, I have chosen to work with books, the fragile material, that in every other sense are very strong.
I constructed my instillation by suspending over one hundred books by telephone wires from an octagon shaped base that was hung from the ceiling. The suspended books constructed an inverted cone shape. The top part diameter is 13 feet and the overall height of work is 14 feet high. There was a net build from steel wires between the octagon sides that supported the suspended books. The books have been manipulated in different ways with mixed media that included oil color, water color, colored dirt, gesso, plaster, and glue. Each book had a space that uniquely surrounded it.
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