Paper Art: Still Obsessed

OPEN IMAGE GALLERY

"The Girl in the Wood" by Su Blackwell

We promised you more Papercut in this space weeks ago, and apparently what we covered is just the tip of the blade. A reader sent in a link to Cuban multi-media artist Elsa Mora's papercut blog. Inspired largely by her childhood in Cuba, Mora uses an X-Acto knife to painstakingly fashion folkloric images such as birds, girls in pinafores, plant life, insects, and the human heart. There is an innocence and longing in her figures that speaks volumes about the silent seiges of family relationships, uncertainty, and passion. Check out her Etsy store here.

Challenging borders, both literal and figurative, is the obsession of Dutch artist Hannah Biemold. First inspired as a child by the mesh paper lanterns she saw at a flea market with her parents, Biemold has explored myriad paper artforms like cut "barcode" portraits, which make use of clever slits over contrasting backgrounds. She also makes shoes (not out of paper).

An artist friend emailed me about UK artist Su Blackwell. Primarily using old books, she creates intricate sculptures using a scalpel to cut and glue the pages of books to create miniature dioramas glowing with lights in wood and glass boxes. Blackwell's artist's statement says it best, "It is the delicacy, the slight feeling of claustrophobia, as if these characters, the landscape have been trapped inside the book all this time and are now suddenly released. A number of the compositions have an urgency about them, the choices made for the cut-out people from the illustrations seem to lean towards people on their way somewhere, about to discover something, or perhaps escaping from something." In addition to a recent show of her work as part of "The 8th East Wing Collection" at The Courtauld Institute in London, Blackwell has also done many commercial works such as this 2007 spot for Beringer: Stay tuned, our next stop is Origamic Architecture.