The thing I like most about making multiples of the same type of paper object is how they look when grouped together. I made more green succulents this week to balance out the red and orange.
Even though these are fairly small they are beginning to overrun the studio…
On Wednesday I managed to make it past the four foot mark with the tyvek piece. To document this progress I took a video with my phone and shared it on Instagram. It’s impossible to fit it into the frame of one photo, so this works rather well.
I think of this as a “fly over” video, similar to filming while flying over the earth in a plane.
How many different titles can I come up with to include the word succulent, is something I wonder every time I write a new blog post about the project. I think I made ten more last week, as I switched between working on the growing cluster of paper plants and the giant piece of tyvek I am cutting.
They have started taking over the top of my paper drawer because there are twenty-five of them now. I love how they look, with all that repeating shape, texture, and delicious colour.
Looking through old blog posts, I was happy to realize it hasn’t yet been a year since I first started working on my second installation piece cut from tyvek. I set it aside in May shortly after I started my artist residency at The Leeway Studio, and have worked on it very little since then.
But I’m back at it with the goal of trying to finish it in the spring, maybe even the end of March. The piece is hand cut from a roll of tyvek that is roughly seven feet long and eighteen inches wide. The design is composed of a series of circles intricately cut with my favourite freehand pattern of crescent shapes (I really should come up with a name for it…)
I was surprised to realize at the end of last week that I’ve cut close to three feet of the piece already. I felt like I’d barely made much progress on it, but I’m close to halfway.
This is the second of three installation pieces from tyvek I eventually plan to create. You can view the first one here.
Sarah Clement just launched a new series on her blog called, Studio Visits, which will feature photos and interviews with Vancouver artists. I am featured in the first post in the series, along with beautiful photos of my work Sarah took when she visited my studio in November.
It’s an honour and a thrill to be included in this project. I can’t wait to see more from the Studio Visit series.
Read the blog post here »
I make the succulents from strips of paper about 1.5 inches wide by 20 inches long, and what is left behind is a very interesting off-cut. I’ve been saving some of these as I go and there’s now a small pile of them at the side of my desk. I may do nothing with them, or I may turn them into an interesting collage at some point. I don’t often do anything with these leftover pieces, but I like to give them careful consideration before they end up in the recycling bin.
This is the new cluster of succulents I worked on last week. I made sixteen of them in various shades of reds and greens. I’m going to keep making more until I have enough to fill a few shadowbox frames.
I’ve had this arrangement of tiny paper succulents sitting in my studio for about a week and a half waiting for me to make a decision about what to do next. I was feeling tentative and uncertain about how to attach them, and even if I should bother. Is this something I want to explore further or is it a distraction from doing other work? Is this “real” art? What is my real artwork, and do I really want to go off on yet another side tangent changing the type of work I do yet again?
It’s a lot of questions for a cluster of tiny succulents to bring up, but that’s what happens sometimes. I’m feeling uncertain about a lot of things around my artwork, and it’s not just about succulents.
Anyway…I adore the cute little things. They are all under 1.5″ high, anywhere from 1.5″ to 2″ across, and made from Canson Mi-teintes 98lb paper. The cluster is glued directly to acid-free white mat board, and framed in a 9″ x 9″ white shadowbox frame.
Looking at them makes me happy in the same way I feel about seeing real succulent plants. Maybe this is the most important part, and why I am going to make more.
At an artist networking event I attended on the weekend I was reminded of a piece of work by Germaine Koh I encountered years ago called, Knitwork. It’s an on-going project she’s been doing since 1992 where she unravels used garments and then re-knits the yarn into one long continuous object.
I’m attracted to this idea of working on a project that grows over time. I’ve been thinking about my flowerbursts as something I want to keep working on and adding to over the long-term, and see where it could end up in two years, or even ten. To date there are about 180 of them, in three different colours. What if there were 500 of them?!
In some ways the flowerburst installation is like working on a quilt, or making a blanket from crocheted granny squares, because it’s also made up of small pieces that combine to become something larger. I like finding these similarities to textiles in my work, though the major difference is the installation doesn’t ever need to be finished and it doesn’t have a functional purpose.
I should look around for other artist projects that are long term in this way. It’s not something I’d seriously considered previously with my own work because I so often work towards a deadline or end goal.
Last week in the studio I spend time on making tiny succulents. I bought new paper to work with and made a few in green. A day later while looking through Instagram I suddenly realized how “on trend” succulents are at the moment, especially paper ones. Ugh.
Now I’m not sure where to go with this. I don’t want to be part of a trend, but maybe I am getting sidetracked anyway. I set out wanting to explore organic plant-like shapes and forms, but not create literal versions of anything specific.
But I do love how succulents look when there is a huge cluster of them. Oh the repetition!
On my days working in the studio this week I’ve continued to work on a variety of paper prototypes. I’m trying to explore different forms, and how to shape them. I am impatient to finish something, so I decided to play around with some of them in a shadow box frame to get a sense of how to bring them all together. These are some of the sketches I made.
They’re ending up more pretty and flowery than I’d intended, but it’s still early days. There are some rounded three dimensional shapes I have no idea how to make so far, and I feel this is the key to making pieces for this series. I hope I can figure it out.