Carrollton High School students Marco Vargas, bottom left, Cashmere Hall, bottom right, and Lauren Dressander, top right, work on their books for the Neva Lomason Memorial Library. Students are taking the old library books and turning them into mixed media pieces of art. Some pages end up just being painted over, some with oils and acrylics while others let the text come through the watercolor paints and some create collages from pieces taken from other books and magazines. (Photo by Cliff Williams/Times-Georgian)
Students will have their art, which will consist of creatively altered books, displayed at the Neva Lomason Memorial Library next month.
The project got its start last summer, when Katherine Ingui received a call from the Carrollton library, asking if she’d like to come look at the more than 300 hardcover books the library was going to dispose of.
“They said they were going to throw these books and over 200 National Geographic magazines away if I didn’t want them, and I thought about a project I did while I was in graduate school,” ingui said. “We are so grateful. They have been a wonderful and crucial gift for my classes and students.”
The show will be held on March 10 from 3 to 5 p.m. at the library. The public is invited.
As for the assignment itself, Ingui said she prompted her students with different ideas and concepts for their book project, then allowed them to create “anything they want.”
“It’s a huge opportunity for them to show their creativity in a different way,” Ingui said.
Ingui said the project includes taking the books and drawing in the margins, writing over the text, cutting out parts of pages and moving them to other pages to create a piece of art that attendees can interact with and flip through.
The project is being done by the teacher’s beginning art classes, but she said the idea will be worked into her curriculum for the advanced classes next year, as well.
The show will have around 100 works, including two from the teacher herself, who said she enjoyed being able to “work alongside” her students. The project started back in August, when Ingui, a Carrollton High graduate, first started teaching at the school.
Ingui said some students were reluctant to start the project because “they saw it as destroying the works of literature.”
“I told them that they weren’t destroying any books — I told them that they were making something new out of them that they could keep and could show off,” Ingui said.
The altered books project was born out of the idea that you can make art out of anything, the teacher said.
“You can take these things that were going to be thrown away and make something really eye-catching and beautiful out of them,” Ingui said. “So that’s what I wanted to teach my students, and I think they’ve learned that art doesn’t have to be done with paint on a canvas.”
Beyond the aesthetic benefits to the works, Ingui said they will also be practical for students who want to show what they can do.
“They’re portable art projects, really,” the teacher said. “Projects that you can carry around with you and will be able to keep forever. It’s been a really successful project, and I’m looking forward to the art show to show what my students have created.”
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