L'imaginaire linguistique et culturel des livres- sculptures de Georgia Russell
The linguistic and cultural imagination of Georgia Russell's sculpture books

Summary/Abstract: The work of Scottish sculptor Georgia Russell shows a particular interest in the power of the written word. Since she arrived in France some fifteen years ago when she started using a foreign language, the artist has been using paper which has become her major artistic medium. She cuts and slashes novels, book covers, newspapers, language dictionaries etc. and her scalpel cuts emphasize some words in particular. By doing so, she creates visual shortcuts which evoke the dreamlike approaches of surrealism or psychoanalysis. In a manner which is common to many contemporary artists, the universal terms she emphasizes in her work suggest a linguistic and cultural imagination which challenges the interaction between art and language. The point of this article will be to explain the way Georgia Russell uses abstract words and transforms them into concrete sculptures, thus creating totemic figures out of paper. This article will primarily show how this transformation of familiar words into visual metaphors allows the beholder to immediately share the artist's imagination.

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