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Book Sculptor Kerry Miller Is Retiring, So Watch One of Her Masterpieces Come Alive

See how Miller puts together her mesmerizing cut parchment sculptures in a new video from Cantor Fine Art Gallery.
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After  years of turning discarded books into intricate sculptural artworks, Kerry Miller is retiring for the foreseeable future. In honor of Miller's prolific career, the Cantor Fine Art Gallery, who previously held a show featuring portraits for the blind, has made a short animated video breaking down the process behind Miller's complex book sculptures. In it, you can watch Miller create miniature worlds out of cut parchment.

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The short video features a book sculpture Miller made from Dickens' Sketches by Boz. She begins by removing the front cover and extracting pages right through the front of the book. She then carefully cuts out the illustration she wants to use in her sculpture. Miller explains that not every illustration already has color, especially if a book is really old and made when color was too expensive for most printers. She'll often color in the illustrations herself. "At this point the book is a little like an empty theater stage awaiting the cast," Miller says. As she gradually reinserts the images back into the frame of the book, moving and manipulating the images as she goes, her arrangement of imagery creates an entirely new sculptural representation of the book. "I love it if I feel I've gone some way towards doing a book justice—creating a bridge through time to bring that book's past into our present. These books have survived the last 100 years. My aim is for their sculpted form to now survive the next 100."

Cantor Fine Art father and son team, Larry and Sam Cantor, started selling Miller's book sculptures three years ago and have since seen her career skyrocket. In the video description, the Cantors write, "Her art has created its own secondary market, with early collectors now capitalizing on their investments in reselling her work…Yet despite her success she is still the humble, polite, witty, amazing person we met three years ago. We could not be more proud of her or her achievements."

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You can check out more work by Kerry Miller on her website and you can learn more about the Cantor Fine Art Gallery, here.

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