From a distance it resembles the texture of oyster mushrooms, their delicate fluted forms cast into whorls of soft colour. Up close you can make out the words that have combined to create the map and the pages of books that have been delicately folded and glued together to create it.
This artwork, Africa Reinvented, has earned Keri Muller her title as the “book artist” or, as Google’s search terms locate her: “Cape Town’s origami expert.” Muller didn’t get to her art by a conventional path and she describes herself more as a “maker” of stuff. It sounds like trendy nomenclature but it’s a fitting description because her work ranges from folding paper to designing with found objects, graphic design, illustration and even jewellery-making.
Muller studied interior design, then went off travelling and came back to work in marketing and product development for tour operators representing East Africa. Three years ago she moved to Mozambique and when she came back it was with “a much bigger appreciation of the fact that every moment of one’s life does count and you can’t fritter it away being 60% content”. That’s when she started making stuff.
I had spotted the Africa made of books in a store in Cape Town in December and was determined to track down the artist, which I did through her blog Simple Intrigue a few days later. The artwork is evocative as much for it being made of words and ideas as it is because of growing nostalgia about the book as physical object steadily being replaced by file transfers and downloads, Kindles and iPads.
She first started folding paper about two years ago. “I have always loved old books and I spent a lot of time in second-hand bookshops and I became aware of how many of the books actually got pulped. You know you go into a second-hand bookshop and they are not madly busy, but there always loads of books coming in.”
Because of the toxicity of the glue used to create the spines of books, most paperbacks never enjoy life post-pulping as a book. The most they can hope for is to come back as the cardboard tube inside a toilet roll.
“I started with a pop-up book. I cut a book and used the story and the imagery to do a tableau scene. I was using old atlases and annuals to fold paper flowers and I made this big paper flower creeper, and then it started rolling from there.”
Muller has a straightforward approach towards the business of her artworks. “I think it’s because I don’t have an art background that I have a very business-oriented take on making stuff. I make things and try new things and I am not precious about it. Other people cringe when I say I want to commercialise my work — but that’s what I do. I sell stuff, whether it’s ideas, quirky things or artworks.”
Apart from her commercial range of cards, prints and illustrations, she also creates the book artworks and takes commissions for bespoke pieces.
Every one of these is handmade, including a recent forest of trees she created out of newspapers and magazines for Naspers media group’s team conference, and an installation created for the South African Literary Awards, which she spent 10 hours building at the venue the night before the event. It was dismantled the following day.
Muller’s Africa Reinvented now hangs in my home — made from titles by authors such as Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and Athol Fugard.
She didn’t start out with the idea of saving books from a hideous fate, but Muller’s work goes some way towards restoring the book to its place as an object worthy of being fetishised, and, perhaps sadly for future generations, as a historical artefact.
Visit simpleintrigue.com