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'm over the half way point with the seven foot long hand cut tyvek piece. It's hard to fit into a photo so I shot this video to give you a sense of scale and what the entire length of it looks like.

A video posted by Rachael Ashe – Paper artist (@rachael_ashe) on Mar 9, 2016 at 11:03am PST

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.

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.