I love paper and my studio is filled with sheets of all sorts — patterned, colored, textured, plain, and lots of different weights. And there’s a big drawer full of sample books. I’m always looking for new paper sources and experimenting with the paper I have.
As we’ve been working on our new house in Santa Fe, I’ve often wondered “how did this get here” — yesterday my husband looked at me quizically and said “why would some previous owner have run the water pipe that way?” If only houses could talk… I recently ran across the recycling: washi tales project, a set of performance pieces that let the paper talk — each piece tells the story of a sheet of Japanese handmade paper as it is recycled through time. They seem to want to explore how the old influences the new, and in their description of the performances they say “The Papermaker, an actor who speaks the local language of the audience, serves as narrator and guide as she creates something new from what she learns of the old. Washi Tales explores aesthetic and spiritual values of recycling, beyond practical environmental concerns, into the realms of history and the imagination.”
There’s lots more on their website, with the added bonus of a lovely set of photos on papermaking and washi.
The eighth Holland Paper Biennial ended last week. Above is Boukje Voet’s Book VIII. The biennials are well documented — you can see images of the work for this year’s show here, and there’s a print catalogue for sale. They also have images from previous years from their website home page.
This past weekend I went to the Spanish Market at the Santa Fe plaza. There were all sorts of crafts, including papercuts (called papel picado in Spanish). They are so intricate, and I thought, not for the first time, about trying one myself. I also saw a demonstration of tinwork — decorations punched into tin (see some examples here) — and I got to look at several punches.
When I got home, I found this page about papel picado that says the designs are sometimes cut the same way as tinwork: “the artisan … cuts through multiple layers of paper using a mallet to pound finely sharpened chisels of varying sizes and shapes through the paper and into the sheet of lead.” (Who knew? I assumed they used scissors or an xacto blade!)
Today, courtesy of Steve Mehallo’s blog, I found a seemingly easier papercutting method — shadow typography done by Seree Kang — see below. You can see more of her work here including a variation she calls “Cube Typography.”
Karen O’Leary hand cuts maps like the one to the left. She sells the originals (pricey) and prints of the originals (not as pricey) and notecards on Supermarket and Etsy. You can find out more about her here and see lots of her work, finished and unfinished, on her Flickr pool.
This 2006 book by Dutch graphic studio floortje fluitsma uses paper cutouts applied to photographs to illustrate a short poem by Cralan Kelder. You can see larger photos of the book here.
From that website, I found the Paper Cut Expo — the site is in Dutch (you can translate it here) — there are links to all the artists in the expo and the introduction says
Referring to the sharp edges of paper, this exhibition shows that paper is not just something to print or write. Decoding is a mindset which also apply in the analog world. More than 15 international designers show innovative ways to deal with (still) one of the most important materials of our civilization.
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