Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing for my upcoming solo show in July at the Ranger Station Gallery in Harrison Hot Springs. The exhibition is one part of the annual Harrison Festival of the Arts, which includes an art market, workshops, and plenty of live music.

It’s this musical aspect of the festival that has led me to create more instruments from paper. My friend Siobhan, a musician as well as a visual artist, loaned me a violin and a tambourine to use as reference. The violin proved to be a much trickier object than an acoustic guitar to puzzle out and reproduce as a three dimensional object in paper.

The tambourine was relatively simple by comparison. What I like best about making instruments from paper are the problem solving skills that kick in as I try to puzzle out how emulate some piece of the object normally carved from wood, or made from metal.

I will be making one final instrument for the show, a mandolin. I’m really hoping it will be easier to reproduce than the violin.