I know people who will cringe at the sight of someone even dog-earing a page in a book. They may be made out of the same dead tree material we throw away by the bushel every day, but put some words on that paper and bind it together and suddenly there's something sacred about it. I've played around with making art out of books before, but even I feel that twinge of hesitation when I set about defacing a piece of literature. Maybe it's embedded training from when we first learned how to use books without drawing all over them. Maybe it's the idea that we're ruining a substantial unit of human knowledge. Maybe it's a communal, vestigial memory from when books took years and years to finish and were among the most valuable objects of human creation. Whatever it is, I still feel bad for drawing all over even the lousiest of 1930s romance novels. 

But sometimes the product is worth the defacement. On her blog An Age of Innocence, Helen Lyôn demonstrates exactly what it takes to convert even a quality piece of literature into fine art. Some of her works are made from classics, like Nabokov's Lolita. Lit purists might balk at the idea of essentially destroying a book of that caliber, but in an age when information--even that in novels--is replicated infinitely, books seem to be in surplus at last. We probably don't need as many records of Nabakov's genius as we have, so why not transform one copy into a unique piece of art? 

Lyôn's work plays with the idea of erasure poetry. Some pieces do indeed seem to be products of the process of erasing all but a few choice words from a pre-existing block of text. But the artist doesn't stop at isolating text within blankness. She'll sew aged, blurry black and white photographs into the pages. Angry scribbles divide the plane. Most pieces cloud the pages of the original book with uneven whitewash, which serves as a canvas for letters stamped or scrawled in ink. Sometimes the white creeps over even those. Fluid drips in layers over the neat, sterile text. The viewer can try to parse the words in the background, but the organic chaos of the artist's hand obliterates them.

Why paint on books? Novels may be escapist portals, but we all bring our own haze when we read them. A particular sentence will evoke a memory that no one else in the world has. No two people have ever read a book in exactly the same way. We draw similar, human reactions from them, but ultimately our readings are our own. 

Age of Innocence's highly evocative pieces engage with the subjectivity of literature. Lyôns transplants desolate moods over pre-written works. Some of her own literary outcries seem to take the form of graffiti on a battered landscape. Some are angry and inarticulate; others, startlingly profound. "All possible feelings do not yet exist," asserts jagged text atop a smeared prescription sheet. "Imagine everything you imagine is real," invites a tower of white block letters hovering over a page of collaged paragraphs. The work haunts; viewing it is like watching human language crystallize organically from a sea of squirming chaos. The Age of Innocence project forces us to stare point-blank at our own process of mark-making and how we use it to fight off the void.