About

Sarah Maker fell in love with book arts when she lived in New York City and discovered The Center for Book Arts. Her favorite teachers and influencers are Sarah Nicholls, Julie Chen,  Ana Cordeiro, and Biruta Auna. 

In her words:

I didn’t know I was an artist until I was 23 years old. I was teaching creative and academic writing at Brigham Young University when I discovered a bookbinding elective in the art department, which I audited. My early explorations in book art were about documenting my daughter’s life and linguistic development. Now the stories I’m compelled to tell are about light and dark, division and inclusion, self and other, and alternative ways of seeing. 

I love distilling books to their elemental forms and augmenting my stories with structure, scale, materials, and interaction. How big or little should the work be to emphasize the concept? What materials should be a part of this story? How do I want people to interact with the work? How should it be presented and/or housed that makes the “reader” a participant in the story?

My love for the book led me to a love for print and many forms of printing make their way into my work.  I usually work with paper, but I also work with leather, wood, metal, clay, fabric, plexiglas, and more. My materials choices are dictated by the artistic concept as much as possible within my skill set. 

I walk the line between analog and digital: I set type manually and in InDesign. I draw with a pencil and paper or in Illustrator. I carve blocks by hand and cut designs with a laser. Tradition and innovation go hand in hand for me.

I also quite happily blur the lines between art, craft, and design. My work flows between them, directed by the story I’m telling. I believe it’s this fluidity that gives my work its strength. My goal is to inspire those who see my work to look more carefully at the people around them, and to discover beauty in themselves.

Community is a significant part of my artistic process. I started the monthly #areyoubookenough challenge on Instagram in January 2017, and it has become a community of over 2000 artists in more than 70 countries. My goal was to create meaningful bonds between book artists across the globe and to educate the world about the book arts. Thousands of artists’ books have been created as a part of this challenge, and pushing myself to create an artist’s book every month for six years has been essential to my development as an artist.