By Sara Breselor
Who doesn’t love the smell of a brand new notebook,” asks British artist Jonathan Chapman, “or get nervous when writing on the first blank page?” The empty sheet of paper is a potent symbol of possibility, an invitation. Though he mentions writing, Chapman himself does not answer this call with words, nor does he fill the page with drawings or paint. In his work, paper is not the canvas but the medium itself.
Marc Hagan-Guirey worked with The Viral Factory on four kirigami models for Samsung Galaxy. The catch? Each model, like The Rockefeller Ice Rink, shown here, had to be tiny enough to fit inside a smartphone cover.
Chapman is one of a growing number of contemporary artists who work primarily in paper. They are part of an evolutionary process over a thousand years old, holders of a vision, and a certain meticulous temperament, shared with Chinese artists of the Song Dynasty (960–1279), who cut paper into intricate designs in a style known as Foshan. The artistic legacy of these early masters developed and spread throughout Europe and Asia as paper became less costly and more common. Origami developed in Japan after a sixth-century introduction from China, and distinct papercraft traditions flourished in India, Turkey, the Ukraine, Poland and Indonesia. The Swiss-German art of scherenschnitte, or scissor cuts, developed in the sixteenth century and traveled to Pennsylvania with colonial settlers two hundred years later. Mexican papel picado, or punched paper, was invented by nineteenth-century farm workers to turn the multicolored tissue paper commonly found at hacienda stores into decorative cut-paper flags, which remain popular today.
Traditional forms have cross-bred and evolved into entirely new techniques. Chapman, an Englishman who is so heavily influenced by Japanese culture and design that he goes by the name Mr. Yen, was introduced to paper art not through Asian traditions but by old cut-paper storybook illustrations by Hans Christian Andersen. Marc Hagan-Guirey, a London-based digital director who recently began constructing fantastic miniature paper buildings, uses techniques of Japanese kirigami (a combination of origami-like structural folding and delicate cutting), but the primary influence reflected by his work is his love of pop culture and horror films. British paper sculptor Su Blackwell, originally a textile artist, was inspired to work with paper by a trip to Southeast Asia, where she saw the paper replicas of everyday objects—shoes, flowers, clothing and accessories, even paper cans of beer—that are burned as Buddhist offerings to the deceased. But Blackwell’s art, including extraordinarily imaginative sculptures made from the printed pages of books, has moved far beyond these early influences. Likewise, Los Angeles-based artist Elsa Mora traces her fascination with paper to her childhood in Havana, Cuba, where she remembers watching a neighbor cut paper doilies, but this two-dimensional introduction grew into the curving, organic sculptural forms that define Mora’s work today.
(Left) Owen Gildersleeve uses layers of paper, “raised at varying heights and shot from above,” an approach typified by this illustration for Scientific American. “I think this gives the illustrations an interesting visual depth,” he says. (Center) The splash screen for the iPad edition of O, The Oprah Magazine shows Yulia Brodskaya’s trademark “quilling” technique. “I draw with paper instead of on it,” says Brodskaya. “I use edge-glued strips of paper as if I’m drawing with a pen. I like to incorporate typography and create very intricate, elaborate designs.” (Right) This piece by Elsa Mora, commissioned by Cosmopolitan China, shows her unique sculptural style. “To shape paper, I sometimes use tools originally intended for jewelry making,” Mora says. “I used to make metal jewelry, so I have a collection of special tools that have been sitting in my studio for years.”
Paper is a humble medium, cheap, readily available and easily repurposed, which has facilitated the art form’s vast growth and variety of technical approaches. But paper’s ubiquity also gives the art an unusual emotional resonance. It’s not foreign to us, as oil paint on canvas or vector-based animation might be. We handle a huge variety of paper types and textures every day: milk cartons, newspapers, envelopes, pizza boxes, glossy magazines, gauzy coffee filters, stiff white to-go cups and the little corrugated jackets they wear. We have all, at one point, cut paper into dolls or snowflakes and folded it into hats or makeshift fans. “Making stuff with paper is intrinsically linked to childhood memories of making and doing,” says Marc Hagan-Guirey. We have a sensory understanding of how it feels to manipulate the medium, and because of this, paper art is tactile, even when we’re just looking at a two-dimensional image. “Paper is such a tangible, undaunting thing,” says Nikki Nye, who partners with Amy Flurry to form the Los Angeles-based Paper Cut Project. “It immediately attracts people because it is so simple and honest.”
(Left) The author of this crime novel wanted the cover to be “really bloody and ugly,” says Estonia-based artist Eiko Ojala. “My biggest challenge was how to please the author and still keep it attractive.” Ojala puts illustrations together digitally and sees his work as a study of layers, shadows and light. (Right) The Snow Queen is a personal work by Su Blackwell. “I use a scalpel with a sharp blade to cut out the shapes, and mold them together with glue and wire,” Blackwell says. “It’s an organic process, not something I did any training in, so a lot of it is trial and error. I’m very patient.”
Many of the artists say that paper’s simplicity is something we naturally crave as art becomes increasingly mediated by technology. “Digital manipulation is so incredibly advanced these days,” says Hagan-Guirey. “We’re becoming almost immune to what looks real.” But with paper artwork, the awareness of skill, labor and craft—how long it took to make, how difficult it was to execute, the innovation behind the concept—is visceral and immediate. “In digital art,” says New York-based artist Mayuko Fujino, “you can make a perfectly straight line even when you’re drunk.” The tangible physicality of paper, however, shows the artist’s limitations as well as their strengths, Fujino says. “What you can do, and can not do, is what makes you unique. That honesty in the art offers viewers a sense of intimacy.”
The honesty is also a unique draw for commercial clients. “It is related to the notion of authenticity,” says Yulia Brodskaya, whose intricate, colorful work has attracted the likes of Hermès and Godiva as well as an impressive list of editorial publications. “Many clients want to send the message that their product is the ‘real deal,’ maybe ethically made, or using environmentally friendly materials. So the graphics they choose are made with care and effort, and you can clearly see what they are made of, and how they are made.” The fashion industry is also drawn to papercraft, largely for its sculptural qualities and expressive potential. Flurry and Nye of Paper Cut Project often work with designers to translate the drama of a run-way show into museum exhibitions and retail displays, which lack the movement and styling of the designer’s original vision for the clothing. “The composition is largely unfinished when placed on a static mannequin,” Flurry says. She and Nye construct elaborate paper wigs, jewelry and accessories to bring the energy and artistry of the runway look into stationary displays.
The peril of paper art is that this tangible energy and sense of authenticity can be lost if the work is not properly photographed. “The texture and tactile quality is what’s really important when capturing an image,” says Chapman, who does all his own photography. “If an image is too flat, it can make the artwork look printed, which is really a waste of your time and effort.” Chicago-based artist Julene Harrison points out that creating a commercially viable image often rules out the shots that best highlight paper artistry. “It’s hard to get a good photo of a paper-cut, especially from head on, which is required for almost all my clients,” she says. Harrison, who also does most of her own photography, came up with a way to create a drop shadow in head-on shots “by either lightly bending and lifting the paper-cut from the background, or by raising the whole thing up using little foam tabs.” Mora gets the best results by putting the artwork on the floor and shooting it from above, experimenting with both natural and artificial light, and tweaking the final image in Photoshop.
(Left) Paper Cut Project created dramatic, Marie Antoinette-inspired wigs for the 2010 holiday window display at the Hudson Bay flagship store in Toronto using nothing but Bristol paper and glue. “Each collection presents a new form or new textures that we have to tease out of a flat sheet of paper, which is wonderful in itself; the possibilities of animation from some-thing so basic,” says Amy Flurry. (Right) French studio Zim & Zou, a.k.a. Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmermann, worked with Ogilvy’s New York and Paris offices on Happy Planet, a greeting card for IBM in the form of a 32-second stop-motion animated video, which was adapted into posters. “It took 280 hours of work, 5 bottles of glue, 58 strings, 65 sheets of paper and about 25,000 cuts, trims and snips,” says Zimmermann.
The deep involvement that the artists have in the photography process speaks to the technological development of an otherwise resolutely analog medium. “Over time, paper art has really embraced the developments in digital media, and the two are now very much interlinked,” says Owen Gildersleeve, a London-based artist who uses Illustrator to plan handmade paper projects and Photoshop to retouch the images of the work. “These developments in digital technology mean that papercraft artists are able to work to quicker timescales, which has really helped to make it a plausible method for commercial commissions.”
There is significant irony in Gildersleeve’s observation, given that so much of paper’s appeal is its un-digital nature. The opposition of paper and pixel is the quintessential representation of the gap between old and new media. But just as paper art is embracing a digital evolution, the digital world is becoming increasingly inter-active and tactile, with motion sensors, touchscreens and gestural interfaces. The way we respond to paper—its honesty and tangibility, the pleasure and possibility of encountering the blank page—in many ways tells us how the digital world needs to behave in order to meet our needs. In a sense, then, the resurgent popularity of this ancient, simple art form is perhaps best understood not as a throwback to the past but a prescient guide to the shape of our digital future. ca
Marc Hagan-Guirey worked with The Viral Factory on four kirigami models for Samsung Galaxy. The catch? Each model, like The Rockefeller Ice Rink, shown here, had to be tiny enough to fit inside a smartphone cover.
Chapman is one of a growing number of contemporary artists who work primarily in paper. They are part of an evolutionary process over a thousand years old, holders of a vision, and a certain meticulous temperament, shared with Chinese artists of the Song Dynasty (960–1279), who cut paper into intricate designs in a style known as Foshan. The artistic legacy of these early masters developed and spread throughout Europe and Asia as paper became less costly and more common. Origami developed in Japan after a sixth-century introduction from China, and distinct papercraft traditions flourished in India, Turkey, the Ukraine, Poland and Indonesia. The Swiss-German art of scherenschnitte, or scissor cuts, developed in the sixteenth century and traveled to Pennsylvania with colonial settlers two hundred years later. Mexican papel picado, or punched paper, was invented by nineteenth-century farm workers to turn the multicolored tissue paper commonly found at hacienda stores into decorative cut-paper flags, which remain popular today.
Traditional forms have cross-bred and evolved into entirely new techniques. Chapman, an Englishman who is so heavily influenced by Japanese culture and design that he goes by the name Mr. Yen, was introduced to paper art not through Asian traditions but by old cut-paper storybook illustrations by Hans Christian Andersen. Marc Hagan-Guirey, a London-based digital director who recently began constructing fantastic miniature paper buildings, uses techniques of Japanese kirigami (a combination of origami-like structural folding and delicate cutting), but the primary influence reflected by his work is his love of pop culture and horror films. British paper sculptor Su Blackwell, originally a textile artist, was inspired to work with paper by a trip to Southeast Asia, where she saw the paper replicas of everyday objects—shoes, flowers, clothing and accessories, even paper cans of beer—that are burned as Buddhist offerings to the deceased. But Blackwell’s art, including extraordinarily imaginative sculptures made from the printed pages of books, has moved far beyond these early influences. Likewise, Los Angeles-based artist Elsa Mora traces her fascination with paper to her childhood in Havana, Cuba, where she remembers watching a neighbor cut paper doilies, but this two-dimensional introduction grew into the curving, organic sculptural forms that define Mora’s work today.
(Left) Owen Gildersleeve uses layers of paper, “raised at varying heights and shot from above,” an approach typified by this illustration for Scientific American. “I think this gives the illustrations an interesting visual depth,” he says. (Center) The splash screen for the iPad edition of O, The Oprah Magazine shows Yulia Brodskaya’s trademark “quilling” technique. “I draw with paper instead of on it,” says Brodskaya. “I use edge-glued strips of paper as if I’m drawing with a pen. I like to incorporate typography and create very intricate, elaborate designs.” (Right) This piece by Elsa Mora, commissioned by Cosmopolitan China, shows her unique sculptural style. “To shape paper, I sometimes use tools originally intended for jewelry making,” Mora says. “I used to make metal jewelry, so I have a collection of special tools that have been sitting in my studio for years.”
Paper is a humble medium, cheap, readily available and easily repurposed, which has facilitated the art form’s vast growth and variety of technical approaches. But paper’s ubiquity also gives the art an unusual emotional resonance. It’s not foreign to us, as oil paint on canvas or vector-based animation might be. We handle a huge variety of paper types and textures every day: milk cartons, newspapers, envelopes, pizza boxes, glossy magazines, gauzy coffee filters, stiff white to-go cups and the little corrugated jackets they wear. We have all, at one point, cut paper into dolls or snowflakes and folded it into hats or makeshift fans. “Making stuff with paper is intrinsically linked to childhood memories of making and doing,” says Marc Hagan-Guirey. We have a sensory understanding of how it feels to manipulate the medium, and because of this, paper art is tactile, even when we’re just looking at a two-dimensional image. “Paper is such a tangible, undaunting thing,” says Nikki Nye, who partners with Amy Flurry to form the Los Angeles-based Paper Cut Project. “It immediately attracts people because it is so simple and honest.”
(Left) The author of this crime novel wanted the cover to be “really bloody and ugly,” says Estonia-based artist Eiko Ojala. “My biggest challenge was how to please the author and still keep it attractive.” Ojala puts illustrations together digitally and sees his work as a study of layers, shadows and light. (Right) The Snow Queen is a personal work by Su Blackwell. “I use a scalpel with a sharp blade to cut out the shapes, and mold them together with glue and wire,” Blackwell says. “It’s an organic process, not something I did any training in, so a lot of it is trial and error. I’m very patient.”
Many of the artists say that paper’s simplicity is something we naturally crave as art becomes increasingly mediated by technology. “Digital manipulation is so incredibly advanced these days,” says Hagan-Guirey. “We’re becoming almost immune to what looks real.” But with paper artwork, the awareness of skill, labor and craft—how long it took to make, how difficult it was to execute, the innovation behind the concept—is visceral and immediate. “In digital art,” says New York-based artist Mayuko Fujino, “you can make a perfectly straight line even when you’re drunk.” The tangible physicality of paper, however, shows the artist’s limitations as well as their strengths, Fujino says. “What you can do, and can not do, is what makes you unique. That honesty in the art offers viewers a sense of intimacy.”
The honesty is also a unique draw for commercial clients. “It is related to the notion of authenticity,” says Yulia Brodskaya, whose intricate, colorful work has attracted the likes of Hermès and Godiva as well as an impressive list of editorial publications. “Many clients want to send the message that their product is the ‘real deal,’ maybe ethically made, or using environmentally friendly materials. So the graphics they choose are made with care and effort, and you can clearly see what they are made of, and how they are made.” The fashion industry is also drawn to papercraft, largely for its sculptural qualities and expressive potential. Flurry and Nye of Paper Cut Project often work with designers to translate the drama of a run-way show into museum exhibitions and retail displays, which lack the movement and styling of the designer’s original vision for the clothing. “The composition is largely unfinished when placed on a static mannequin,” Flurry says. She and Nye construct elaborate paper wigs, jewelry and accessories to bring the energy and artistry of the runway look into stationary displays.
The peril of paper art is that this tangible energy and sense of authenticity can be lost if the work is not properly photographed. “The texture and tactile quality is what’s really important when capturing an image,” says Chapman, who does all his own photography. “If an image is too flat, it can make the artwork look printed, which is really a waste of your time and effort.” Chicago-based artist Julene Harrison points out that creating a commercially viable image often rules out the shots that best highlight paper artistry. “It’s hard to get a good photo of a paper-cut, especially from head on, which is required for almost all my clients,” she says. Harrison, who also does most of her own photography, came up with a way to create a drop shadow in head-on shots “by either lightly bending and lifting the paper-cut from the background, or by raising the whole thing up using little foam tabs.” Mora gets the best results by putting the artwork on the floor and shooting it from above, experimenting with both natural and artificial light, and tweaking the final image in Photoshop.
(Left) Paper Cut Project created dramatic, Marie Antoinette-inspired wigs for the 2010 holiday window display at the Hudson Bay flagship store in Toronto using nothing but Bristol paper and glue. “Each collection presents a new form or new textures that we have to tease out of a flat sheet of paper, which is wonderful in itself; the possibilities of animation from some-thing so basic,” says Amy Flurry. (Right) French studio Zim & Zou, a.k.a. Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmermann, worked with Ogilvy’s New York and Paris offices on Happy Planet, a greeting card for IBM in the form of a 32-second stop-motion animated video, which was adapted into posters. “It took 280 hours of work, 5 bottles of glue, 58 strings, 65 sheets of paper and about 25,000 cuts, trims and snips,” says Zimmermann.
The deep involvement that the artists have in the photography process speaks to the technological development of an otherwise resolutely analog medium. “Over time, paper art has really embraced the developments in digital media, and the two are now very much interlinked,” says Owen Gildersleeve, a London-based artist who uses Illustrator to plan handmade paper projects and Photoshop to retouch the images of the work. “These developments in digital technology mean that papercraft artists are able to work to quicker timescales, which has really helped to make it a plausible method for commercial commissions.”
There is significant irony in Gildersleeve’s observation, given that so much of paper’s appeal is its un-digital nature. The opposition of paper and pixel is the quintessential representation of the gap between old and new media. But just as paper art is embracing a digital evolution, the digital world is becoming increasingly inter-active and tactile, with motion sensors, touchscreens and gestural interfaces. The way we respond to paper—its honesty and tangibility, the pleasure and possibility of encountering the blank page—in many ways tells us how the digital world needs to behave in order to meet our needs. In a sense, then, the resurgent popularity of this ancient, simple art form is perhaps best understood not as a throwback to the past but a prescient guide to the shape of our digital future. ca
Sara Breselor (sarabreselor.wordpress.com) is a San Francisco–based writer and the editor of the IDEO Labs website. She’s a regular contributor to Wired and the Harper’s Weekly Review, and her writing has also appeared in Idiom magazine, Salon and Slate.
