Those who can't do, teach, or so the saying goes. But don't tell that to Jacqueline Rush Lee, one of a growing army of Honolulu artists who spends just as much time in the classroom as in the studio.

When Lee isn't teaching art to children as part of the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts' Artists in the Schools Program, or with the Honolulu Academy of Arts' Art To Go and Art Ambassadors programs, she is busy showing her own work in exhibitions from Washington state to New York.

This winter, Lee is stationed at Barbers Point Elementary School in Kapolei, teaching third-graders. Lee uses her teaching model, the "Exploratory Art Lab," to introduce students to contemporary art while integrating concepts from the school's core curriculum.

Using everyday materials such as multicolored plastic straws, the art lessons teach key concepts (in the case of the straws, principles of levers and fulcrums) to create free-standing sculpture. In a previous residency at Red Hill Elementary School, Lee used the foundation skeleton of a large clay dolphin sculpture to introduce the idea of astronomical constellations.

"The program promotes the aesthetic values of art but also integrates the arts with other content areas as students begin to see that art is in everyday life," notes Gail Sakata, a teacher at Barbers Point.

The recent economic downturn and the state's overarching budget cuts put the future of the Artists in the Schools Program and other arts education programs increasingly in jeopardy.

However, Lee, who grew up in Northern Ireland, has been teaching in Hawai'i since she moved here in 1993 and remains optimistic about the future of arts in local public schools.

"I think the mark of a fantastic education is that they all have arts," she says. "Even if you're not an artist, looking at an educated person who has a rounded point of view ... it's very important."

Lee likes to think of herself as a role model for the children she teaches. From her working-class background, she recollects that "art was not seen as a gainful opportunity." And so, to bring artists into the school itself teaches the students about what sorts of opportunities are open to them.

"You're a role model," Lee says, "regardless of what you're teaching, you know. They're learning about art; they're absorbing a lot."

Indeed, Lee does serve as a model artist. Her artwork, which focuses primarily on the concept and form of the book, is in international collections from London to New York.

Her work is on display in "The Book Borrowers: Contemporary Artists Transforming the Book" at the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington state, INTROspective at the Center for Book Arts in New York, and locally in the 10th International Shoebox Sculpture Exhibition at the University of Hawai'i Art Gallery.

Lee is best known for her annihilation of the book form. From her earlier work firing the tattered carcasses of novels in her kiln to her current work that involves painstakingly painting over each page of each book with black ink, Lee transforms her book subjects into unrecognizable reincarnations of their former selves.

Although the destruction of books might at a glance seem an unusual pastime for an artist/teacher, Lee chooses her subjects carefully. For Lee, the well-used book itself holds deep power by virtue of the accumulated time and energy expended upon it. This sort of spiritual residue forms the basis of Lee's work.

In her most recent "Devotion" series, and her current work utilizing books curled into circular forms reminiscent of a cathedral's stained-glass rose windows, the book takes on a decidedly meditative, religious connotation.

When asked about the meditative tone to the work and her own religious inclinations, Lee plays coy. "I can't control what people say ... And sometimes I don't even know what my work means when I make it," she says.

For a moment setting aside her bubbly personality and role as a teacher, Lee reflects, "To me, I like it to just be about the work. I like to be behind the work. But you know, that's part of being an artist. You have to be out there too."