AUBURN - They are stories of life and death, dreams and memories, literally torn from the pages of the books impaled upon the Schweinfurth Art Center walls; opened, cover-flat-to-cover, as though their arms were tied behind their backs, their souls exposed.

Artist Heather Wetzel shared her personal thoughts on the piece, sitting among the audience at the art center Sunday.

“I was extremely close to my grandparents,” said Wetzel. “When I would stay with them, it was the one place I felt safe, serene, loved, and happy.”

When her grandmother died November 1999, followed by the death of her grandfather five months later, she was left with her grandmother's collection of elephants that she once dusted on a glass shelf, and a doll.

“I tend to project human emotions into inanimate objects. This doll, I just imagined she must have been feeling lonely, now separated from the elephants. I felt what she was feeling,” Wetzel said.

The event poured into the artist's subconscious, surfacing into the notion of dreams as waves of thoughts and memories, interacting with one another, and the life of the individual.

It is that synchronization which her work achieves. Indeed, the viewer is invited to purchase one of the books, arranged into a flowing pattern along three walls, for $10.

Drifted against the base of the walls are fragments of pages from the books which were painstakingly turned into material art by Wetzel.

For those books taken, only the nail that held it remains, with passages randomly constructed from the lost words of torn sentences, written on the wall near it.

The grammatical concept was inspired by the work of author William Burroughs, who experimented with cut up, randomly reconstructed sentences. The art, Wetzel explained, was inspired by her dreams.

“All my work is based on dreams and memory recall: it grows in an organic way,” she said. “My goal was to have hundreds of them (books). I ended up with two hundred.”

Only a fraction of that amount comprises the Schweinfurth display.

However, another 500 remain as potential art pieces, collected by Wetzel from bins of books, ranging from romance to children's to religious to instructional, marked for free.

“The books no one wanted,” she said.

With pages torn in a comma shape from approximately the center to end, each book is then glued at the binding, with the remaining pages curled and waxed, presenting a shape that extends outward to a point, resembling whatever the viewer believes.

“It's labor intensive,” Wetzel said, of the process. “But also very meditative and soothing. There is something to be said for the repetitive nature of it: healing and solidifying things in your head.”

Intrigued by the expression created by the piece, Jack White, of Auburn, was also quite accustomed to the world of nontraditional art.

“I'm very interested in it. It's not a new format to me: art's kind of moving in different directions these days - you can be inspired by every day objects,” he said, advising: “You have to walk into this with an open mind, or you'll miss the whole thing.”

Of Wetzel, he added: “She has a very interesting appeal. She does things off the beaten path. I'd like to follow her career.”

Wetzel's art will be on display through Aug. 26.