Do you remember those paper instruments I was commissioned to make a few months ago? The music video they appear in has recently surfaced and I can finally share it with you.
This is Current Swell’s latest release, “I Want A Bird”.
The video was created by the wonderful team at Giant Ant.
I’ve long admired the work of Elsa Mora, a Cuban artist living in LA who works in various mediums including paper cutting. I was looking at her website earlier this week as a way to jog my thinking on how to write about my own paper cut work, and came across her new site, Art Is A Way.
It’s a lovely little side project of creating artwork using the word Art, and she’s invited people to join her. I don’t normally have much interest in exploring typography in my own work, but the project inspired me to experiment with typography created in my style of cut paper.
I chose a font in photoshop, Tamil NM in bold, made it large enough to nicely fill an 8.5″ x 11″ page and printed it out. I used this as a template to trace the outline of the letters first and then freehand cut all shapes. It was really fun to do, and has me pondering more potential work using type.
If you’re interested in creating your own work of the word Art, check out the about page of Art Is A Way for details.
I realize as I work on these structural paper cut pieces that I am exploring two very different things and trying to make them work together. It’s one thing to make a paper cut design that will be displayed as flat and in a frame, and quite another to translate it into a free-standing sculpture. I’m also trying to work out how to make interesting structures from paper that can support themselves when most of the material has been removed.
With this latest piece I was trying to take a slightly different approach than the previous work I finished last week, but I ended up creating the same structure, just with a different paper cut design.
The variation I attempted with this was to score the bottom and sides to create folds in the paper. I don’t quite have enough understanding about how to do this, so my folds didn’t work the way I thought they should. I was also going to taper the structure at the top and attach it together but threw that idea out the window as well.
I want to play around with structural explorations on their own without doing all the work of cutting paper, just to properly educate myself. But the paper cutting makes a big difference to the integrity of the piece, how it holds together, and its ability to stand.
Just in case you’re wondering, the finished size for this one is 8″ high, 6″ wide, and 3″ long. I hope I can eventually make something even larger.
Last week was mostly spent on administrative tasks but at the end of the week I fit in time to work on another cut paper sculpture.
I kept the form simple and made a basic cube with two of the sides left long. I’d had in mind to have these two long flaps eventually connect together but things went in a different direction as I worked.
I chose a leaf as the repeating shape and cut away most of the paper on four sides, leaving the bottom uncut. I decided to contour the top and sides of the box by cutting away the straight edges of the paper. It makes the whole thing seem even more delicate.
I left a thin border of paper around the sides and attached these together with glue. The finished size is about 5.5″ tall, 4″ wide, and 4″ long.
I’m really pleased with this prototype. I actually feel ready to move onto creating finished work.
After I finished the paper cut pyramid last week I began to work on a second piece with a different approach to making something three dimensional. Instead of creating the structure from a single sheet I used scraps of paper cut into triangles of different sizes, two as sides, and one as a bottom piece. I wanted to cut the design first and then attach the paper together afterwards.
I spent a lot of time cutting paper and not so much on determining the structure, but I wanted to see how well pieces of paper can support themselves when most of the material is cut away. It sags of course, especially on the sides that are unattached. I would need to include more structural support if translated into a larger scale.
It’s a lovely piece, and I think the shadows are an integral part of it.
For the next prototype I will do less with paper cutting and focus more on structure just to see where this will take me. Stay tuned.
My paper cutting demo at Opus went very well on the weekend. The people who attended were very interested, and most seemed to get a lot out of it. I wasn’t sure how well I could share how I do this work, but I did just fine thanks to careful preparation.
It was inspiring to me to talk about this work, and was just the thing I needed to get back producing in the studio again. I’m trying to think ahead to possible upcoming shows which could happen up to two years from now (if my proposal is accepted). I’ve never worked this way before and I’m unsure how to project so far ahead because my work is constantly evolving in ways I don’t foresee.
Rather than getting bogged down with this I decided to experiment and build further on the paper cutting work I’ve been doing. I was intrigued with the idea of creating something three-dimensional. I chose to create a pyramid-like box and cut three of the sides with the usual intertwining crescent shapes. I wanted to see how this would work, and not focus too much on specific details.
The finished prototype is rough and imperfect, but a really good starting point for figuring out more three dimensional pieces. It plays wonderfully with direct light too. I’m trying to imagine it larger, but it makes my hand sore just thinking about it.
My first forays back into the studio have found me feeling uninspired and stuck. I know the best way around this is to just sit down, get to work, and focus on getting my hands moving rather than on the results. This often works very well with me because I am a process driven artist and I created in a spontaneous manner anyway.
I grabbed my knife and a piece of paper, made some quick decisions about what I wanted to do, and then began cutting.
I’ve used this leaf shape many times before, but this time I wanted to work smaller and closer together, and end up with an overall form that wasn’t round. Working in a radial naturally lends itself a circular form but I wanted to see how it could work in a more squared composition.
I cut the design until it was about eight inches in diameter and then began working it into a square. It looked beautiful at that point but I decided to keep pursuing the idea. It went through a phase where I thought I’d ruined it but pushed on and came through to the end where I’ve achieved the squarish form (I was never going for a perfect square).
I don’t think I will work this small as a general rule, even though it was interesting to try it out, because it doesn’t read well overall.
Even though this took many hours and xacto blades to create, I consider it a sketch resulting from an exercise and not finished work. It did the trick though, because I find myself INSPIRED!
I came very close to not finishing my work for the Sketchbook Project 2013, because I’ve been sick off and on for the past month and my concentration has been almost nil. I chose to completely ignore any theme and experimented with an idea I’ve had in mind for awhile.
Using a plastic template of circles, ovals, triangles, squares, and octagons that I created from sheets I got at cutmyplastic.co.uk. I went through the entire sketchbook and drew repeating shapes covering each page to create patterns. I tried something different with each two page spread, sometimes using the same shape in different sizes, and other times combining a mix of different shapes.
When all the drawing was completed, I went back through with an xacto knife and spontaneously cut different designs and compostions from the paper. Not all of these were successful but I decided to just let it be and not get hung up on results.
I love some of the pages, and strongly dislike others, but overall I’m happy to send it off for inclusion in the Brooklyn Art Library.
In December I shared two paper cut pieces featuring the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, which I’d created for an upcoming exhibition in Victoria. Both ended up selling within a week of completion (yay!) and so I needed to make something else to meet the commitment for the show.
I decided to make two new pieces, one to revisit the white rabbit and the other inspired by the Cheshire cat.
When I began working on the Cheshire Cat I had just seen “My Neighbour Totoro” the previous evening. I decided the character of the Catbus with it’s HUGE grin made for the perfect face to use for this. I chose to cut leaf shapes to suggest the tree where Alice first encounters the Cheshire Cat in the story.
I drew the leaf pattern before cutting, which is not my usual thing for creating a paper cut. The top and bottom layers are cut from single sheets of paper and mounted into the wood cradle panel. The cat face is also a separate piece of paper.
For the white rabbit I decided to do a variation on the one I’d created originally. I really wanted it included in the show but wasn’t interested in reproducing the exact same work. I cut two layers of circles rather than three, and placed the white rabbit more centrally.
I didn’t like this one as much as the first but it’s grown on me. There is something about having three layers of circles that has more impact and interest. I’m going to explore this idea further in future work I think.
Both pieces can be seen next month in Curiouser, at the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective in Victoria.
Earlier in the fall I was invited to be part of an upcoming group show in Victoria that explores the theme of Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass. I hadn’t had any time until last week to figure out and create something new for this show because I don’t currently have anything appropriate. I was stumped and uninspired at first because the theme doesn’t really fit into my current body of work, and I’m reluctant to create one-off pieces just to satisfy the requirements of a group show.
I was actually really close to passing up on this opportunity. But I surprised myself and found my way through to creating work I am very pleased with. The White Rabbit was my inspiration and he took me down a rabbit hole of layers and layers of circles.
“Down the Rabbit Hole” | 10″ x 10″
Both of these are 10″ x 10″ with the cut paper mounted inside a wood cradle panel. There are three layers of paper in each one, and I used a compass cutter to cut the circles. I’d been playing around with this idea in my head because I have a circle cut pile of maps left over from a previous project, and I intend to do something with them. The layers work very well and build on my recent work of a single repeating shape.
To create the two rabbit silhouettes I sourced images of the white rabbit from google images, printed these out to the correct size and used them as a template. I left the details of each of them very minimal on purpose.
“Down the Rabbit Hole” | 10″ x 10″
I showed photos of these on Instagram as I worked on them last week and was thrilled to have such a positive reaction to the work. I’ll share more details about the show closer to the date next year.