FE AT URE
Paper artists are turning new pages.
Sure, rock smashes scissors. And yeah, scissors cut paper. But is that so bad? After all, a handful of artists around the globe are slicing up the pulpy product in strikingly inventive ways.
Instead of sculpting with clay or pushing pigment around a canvas, they’re razoring sheets into ghostly portraits, photographing books as Ansel Adams would landscapes, and constructing functional objects from bound texts.
Paper, essentially mashed-up plant material, has been a record-keeping wonder since ancient Egyptians first soaked, pressed, and dried strips of papyrus, a sedge native to the Nile Valley. And in Japan, origami — the art of folding paper — has been a pastime since the 1600s.
“Paper is inexpensive and easy to manipulate, and it can last a long time under the right conditions,” says Kako Ueda, a Brooklyn-based artist from Japan who employs immense patience in her love affair with the fiber.
Ueda creates astonishing paper cutouts of “hybrid beings” using only an X-Acto knife, a technique similar to that used by the kimono-stencil makers of her homeland.
Scotland’s Georgia Russell is another similarly devoted paper piercer. She painstakingly feathers the pages of found photographs, books, musical scores, maps, and money with a scalpel so that fine strips flare from acrylic frames.
“Paper is so incredibly versatile,” says Australian sculptor Dan McPharlin, who renders miniature replicas of vintage synthesizers and recording equipment out of cardboard. “Working with it doesn’t require expensive tools or a sophisticated studio,”
he says. “The process is relatively quick from idea to finished product.”
McPharlin collects the real-life inspirations for his tiny sculptures. He simply thought it’d be fun to fashion the high-tech objects in a low-tech medium. But he’s quick to point out cardboard’s many sophisticated virtues. In the 1960s, for example, architect Frank Gehry pioneered the use of it for lightweight, inexpensive furniture.
One of McPharlin’s biggest influences is sculptor Richard Sweeney. Based in London, Sweeney cuts, scores, and folds paper into alabaster fixtures that look like a cross between a diatom and a buckyball.
Indeed, Sweeney takes inspiration from the repetition found in nature and architecture. He has said of his work that his goal is to “create objects that are simple to construct yet complex in appearance, and are efficient in the way they are produced, both in terms of construction time and material use.”
While many artists work with paper for its ease and thrift, others, like Texas photographer Cara Barer, are capturing the product’s inherent beauty. By wetting the pages of phone books and computer manuals and holding them in place with curlers and clothespins, she seizes graceful sepia-toned portraits.
Abelardo Morell, a Cuban-born photography professor whose work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, takes gorgeous black and white stills of books that seem to move with the subtle speed of glaciers. And his brain-teasing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland series brings
» Abelardo Morell’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” series, from 1998, brings scenes from Lewis Carroll’s tale to life.
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