ON a visit to Shellie Jacobson’s home-based studio in Skillman, the first thing you notice are the small ceramic works hanging on the wall near her kitchen. Sort of like small irregular tiles, they have abstract shapes and forms attached.

   ”I call them little drawings,” says the ceramic and book artist. “It’s an immediate response — they are a collage of leftovers.” She thinks she did them 20 or so years ago, and “It was the first time I used language in my work.” The little letters for the stream-of-consciousness words (“yoyo,” “jacks” and “ball”) were made by pressing alphabet pasta into the clay that left impressions when it burned out in the firing.

   When the artist offers a cup of tea, you get a glimpse into her cupboard to see a collection of ceramic cups. Ms. Jacobson is quick to assure you she didn’t make these — she doesn’t do functional pottery.

   On the sleek, clutter-free granite countertop in the immaculate kitchen is a pile of stringless tea bags left out to dry.

   ”I make garments out of these,” says Ms. Jacobson. “They take a long time, so I only make one a year.”

   Some of that time is consumed by collecting and drying the tea bags. At a recent holiday gathering for 20, Ms. Jacobson’s niece, helping to clean up, disposed of the tea bags. “I had to go through the garbage to retrieve them, and I know my niece was thinking, ‘My aunt has lost it!’ I had to explain that these were art supplies,” recounts Ms. Jacobson.

   On the way upstairs to her studio, we walk through a gallery of Ms. Jacobson’s two-dimensional work, starting with a Persian miniature she painted while an art student at Carnegie Mellon University. Imitating the ancient technique, the young Ms. Jacobson painted her favorite shoe store in Pittsburgh with contemporary figures in a highly patterned room. What looks like Persian lettering at the lower left actually says, on closer inspection, “This is a Shoe Store.”

   Further along the wall is a love story to an old boyfriend in letters that have been cut apart, jumbled, and rearranged into a pattern. Ms. Jacobson, who holds a doctorate in education, admits to being dyslexic. Throughout her life she used coping skills to overcome her brain’s tendency to jumble letters, but the text in her artwork represents a celebration of dyslexia, albeit not intentional. In some cases she uses letters in a jumbled way, or may just use text as a design or graphic element. She uses graffiti and pictographs, and in other cases, such as her handmade books, she writes poetry and then builds the book around the poem.

   ”There are ongoing narratives in my head and sometimes it just needs to get out,” Ms. Jacobson says.

   Ms. Jacobson is one of 25 artists currently exhibiting in Below the Surface at the Printmaking Council of New Jersey in Branchburg. The exhibition, which includes Princeton-area artists Arlene Milgram and Judy Tobie, explores the intersection of book arts and the printed surface.

   In Ms. Jacobson’s studio is a large basket of the dried tea bags, ready to be incorporated into garments. She removes the tea leaves and uses the tea-stained translucent pouch to hold precious materials, then stitches it together.

   A member of the Princeton Artists Alliance, Ms. Jacobson is working with that group on an upcoming exhibition inspired by the Pine Barrens, somewhat like an exhibition the group did several years ago on the Hamilton-Trenton-Bordentown Marsh. For this project, Ms. Jacobson has in mind a good-luck hunting shirt for scientists. To research the Pines, she and other PAA members met with scientists to looks at flora and fauna. “I went nuts with insects,” she says. “I asked for leftovers and did my own collecting. I just want you to know that no animals were harmed in the making of this garment.”

   Just as entomologists drape a cloth over light to attract insects, Ms. Jacobson speculates this teabag shirt could be worn to attract insects. “It’s like an African hunter’s garment,” she says. “If the hunter wore claws, feathers, shells, bones and blood it would give them good luck in the hunt, so that’s how I’ve interpreted (this garment).”

   Holding one of the little tea pouches up to the light, Ms. Jacobson shows how each contains tiny photographs made in the Pine Barrens, printed on Japanese paper. She has incorporated ancient lettering to reference how the Pine Barrens formed in the Ice Age.

   Other pouches contain the wing skeleton of a dragonfly, a monarch, seeds from a pinecone and ashes from a fire in the Pine Barrens. On her daily walks, Ms. Jacobson collects these bits of nature; her basement studio, where she does the ceramic work, is like a museum of animal skulls and bones, birds nests, fungus, pods, honeycombs and other ephemera, along with the work it has inspired, all carefully arranged on shelves. Even paper peeling from a neighbor’s utility pole and an old Camel cigarette pack are fair game.

   So, then, are these garments or “books”?

   ”Today the definition of book arts is wide open,” she says. “The artist is using book materials for self expression.”

   Ms. Jacobson makes amulet vests with a mini book on the shoulder. For the PAA Marsh exhibit, she made a vest that looks like it is made from the peeling birch of a tree. In fact she has photographed the peeling birch and printed it on curling paper to reflect the tree, then stitched it to the vest.

   Back in seventh grade, when required to take sewing in school, she discovered sewing on paper and enjoyed making designs with stitching — something she still loves to do. Just as functional pottery doesn’t interest her, she had no desire to sew a dress. She did, however, wear the peeling birch vest... at least to try it on.

   Ms. Jacobson makes monoprints on tiles that are made of sheets of clay sandwiched together like phyllo dough that also suggest books. One, “Camel Dreams,” incorporates imagery from that crushed Camel cigarette pack along with ancient text.

   She has only been working in book arts since 2001. Before that, Ms. Jacobson worked primarily in clay — her doctoral dissertation is on “A Master’s Potter’s Dialogue with Clay, Glazes and Fire: A Case Study in Creative Process,” and she was an educator for many years, but as a ceramic artist she is mostly self taught. After years of making non-functional teapots, non-representational figures, vessels that don’t hold water and clay “drawings,” she found her way to clay books. In some cases there would be handmade paper in the clay books.

   From vessels to tiny tiles, garments and surfaces for text in all its forms, Ms. Jacobson is finding all her efforts coming together now, tightly bound as the pages of a book.

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  Below the Surface is on view at the Printmaking Council of New Jersey, 440 River Road, Branchburg, through Dec. 5. Hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sat. noon-4 p.m. 908-725-2110; www.printnj.org