Sarah Stengel’s artwork, on view at Ellarslie, breathes life back into many a forgotten volume.
By: Jillian Kalonick
In the yellowed pages of a book on the history of Frankish kings roosts a collection of birds toucans, owls, woodpeckers, pelicans, penguins. Perched below facts on Clovis III and Dagobert II, the birds are obviously not where they belong, but look so territorial, almost defiant.
The artwork is Sarah Stengle’s "Histoire Naturelle," a collage on found book pages, one of her many pieces that combine scientific or historical themes with nature. Birds, along with eggs, bones, leaves and eyes, show up often in her art, which is made up of her "visual vocabulary."
"Some iconography that I use is more personal," says Ms. Stengle. "Birds are sort of a humorous stand-in for men."
Ms. Stengle will exhibit her collages at Rock, Paper, …, a show also featuring sculpture by Petro Hul, at Ellarslie in Trenton Nov. 12 to Jan. 8. Much of her art uses found images, often taken from what she finds at the used bookstores in Bordentown, the Cranbury Bookworm or at the annual Bryn Mawr-Wellesley Book Sale in Princeton.
"I buy what’s called breakers, books that are already ruined, or have been in a flood, or have damaged covers," she says. "I pretty much only buy the ones that are destroyed, unless they’re so scientific and technical that I know no one has looked at them in 25 years."
She stockpiles several volumes at a time, developing "a backlog of unrealized ideas that keeps me working," she writes in an artist’s statement. From these she lifts the elements for her collages. Mathematical tables and medical illustrations are often intertwined with flora and fauna.
"Math and numbers are used almost as a stand-in for a certain way of thinking about the world that is analytic and left-brained," she says. "Color and rainbows and flowers are juxtaposed to that as a more emotional way of looking at the world."
In "Mathematics Plate 118," a collection of animals are bisected and placed into geometric diagrams; the tail end of a reptile is sliding into a triangle, while a squirrel munches on an acorn in a cage of two squares. In "Animal Nature," a planetary chart is adorned with a statue of Venus, a chess board, a trombone, a screw and other odd objects. The result of these combinations can be humorous, or perplexing; they require a reading of the symbols. Many images of Ms. Stengle’s works also integrate text by the author.
"I thought writing on work was really self-indulgent and asking a lot of the viewer," she says. "And then I just decided to be self-indulgent and ask a lot of the viewer. Because what it demands is that you stop and pay attention to it, and read it for longer than what an image demands. The integration of image and text in our culture usually is in these marginal things, like graphic novels and children’s books that aren’t accepted as fine art because they’re specific and not transcendent.
"When you write, you pin the image down in a way," she continues. "An image by itself is much more open to interpretation. And when you illustrate a text, you pin the text down. In a way they both lose value because you can’t bring your own associations to it they’re tied to each other."
Ms. Stengle, who earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at Carnegie Mellon University and a master’s of fine arts degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has been drawing since she can remember, and also explored painting and metalsmithing. She made sculptures but was frustrated at the slow pace, and began drawing figures and putting them together. She started working as a part-time book designer for Princeton University Press in 2003, after becoming interested in typesetting while completing an artist’s book.
"I see it as more than a day job," she says. "It feels a little bit like a calling. It’s the same kind of thing (as collages), you have all these elements and you have to pull them together and make them work. It takes the same kind of patience and same kind of eye, even though it’s a different modality."
Ms. Stengle mostly designs academic monographs, but occasionally "something juicier" like a classics or poetry book. Aiming for legibility and clarity, she finds it’s much more peaceful than creating art.
"I’m much more in love with designing the interior of the book than the covers," she says. "To me the covers are advertisements and the book itself is the object. I think of that as the disposable part of the object."
The key to a well-designed book is a concentration on elements no one else will even notice, she explains. "Really good typography should almost be invisible," Ms. Stengle says. "You almost only notice typography when it’s bad. For most books, it shouldn’t call attention to itself. It should just be right."
Working about 15 to 20 hours a week for Princeton University Press, Ms. Stengle spends the rest of the time making art in her studio on Cass Street in Trenton, which she purchased and converted from a club into four artist’s workspaces. A native of Bethlehem, Pa., Ms. Stengle lived in New York City for 20 years and moved to Princeton with her two daughters, 9 and 11, following a divorce. Recently, she says, she’s found that her work has become more personal, especially the album pages that will be on view at Ellarslie.
"Some aspects of the work are really dark," she says. "They’re extremely feminine conventional imagery mixed with very dark text about denial and the veil of manners and convention put over all kinds of things like alcoholism, child abuse, violence on the playground. There’s a very unexpected twist in terms of looking at these almost imbecilicly saccharine images and what the text says. Those are the rawest pieces. When I did them I never imagined showing them."
When she found the courage to display them, she discovered that being less self-conscious and saying what she really wanted to say elicited reactions to her art she never got before.
"People come up to me and start telling their stories," she says. "For me, it’s a little more electric. It means I hit on something that matters to them or something that made them wake up to the memory of some thought. I really do see it as a form of communication."
Rock, Paper, … is on view at Ellarslie, Cadwalader Park, Trenton, Nov. 12-Jan. 8. Reception: Nov. 12, 7-9 p.m. Hours: Tues.-Sat. 11 a.m.-3 p.m., Sun. 1-4 p.m. For information, call (609) 989-3632. On the Web: www.ellarslie.org

