guy laramee carves a mountain terrain out of encyclopedias

guy laramée carves a mountain terrain out of encyclopedias
all images courtesy of guy laramée

paying homage and bidding farewell to the dying necessity of reading books for learning and knowledge, montreal-based artist guy laramée transforms a set of encyclopedia britannicas into an artwork, intricately carving its near-endless spread of pages into a vast and rocky mountianscape. ‘adieu’ takes its namesake from the french word meaning ‘goodbye’, alluding to the bygone era of the popular information editions, after recently announcing the discontinuation of their 244 year history in publishing — an evident sign of the growing demand of digital communication. laramée imagined the vertical stacks as an epic landscape, chiseling out the tops of both the hard covers and leaflets compiled inside into a lush terrain, like ones the artist had visited in ecuador, peru and brazil. a downward slope descends the length of the tangible series, carefully modeled to have a rigid and rough topography. the terrain visualized repurposes the encyclopedias and breathes in them a new life, nodding to the nostalgia of declining generation of paper books.

the rocky landscape carved from the tops of the encyclopedias

blue and yellow terrain made from the pages of the books

a detail of the intricate carving by guy laramée