After having a lecture about trace artists last year it occurred to me at the beginning of the year to collect each piece of paper that I have cut out, almost as a negative space idea.
Over all this time I have amassed quite a hefty collection in a multitude of colours of pieces of paper and stored them in this little box.
I plan on displaying a huge pile of paper in my degree show as symbol of a trace and the amount of piece that I have had to painstakingly cut out each and everyday. It acts as a reminder of the amount of work, dedication and effort goes into my work and how much time and effort also goes into it too.
I experimented with silhouette work inspired by Kara Walker in my work and attempted to do so in the dark room in our university.
I ran into some issues when attempting to document the silhouettes. To create the silhouette was much more difficult than I thought it would be. It had to have a strong enough light behind it, be close enough to the wall and all at the same time as taking the picture.
Since I didn’t have four hands I have to do a lot of setting up and working on timing in order to achieve any semblance of a silhouette.
Another issue I found was that my flash kept going off, blurring out the silhouette completely from the pictures as there wasn’t enough lighting in the room to stop the flash automatically going off each time. Because of this I had to switch cameras and finally could take the pictures.
The picture quality isn’t amazing due to the difficulties that arose during the experiment but it was interesting to see the cutout as a silhouette and to experiment with what the light could look like shining on the cut out and through it also.
One of my pieces had unfortunately been broken by someone putting their foot through it when it was residing on the floor and tearing a piece approximately 15 inches long across it with their foot.
This gave me the idea of repairing it, but just not quite like before. I had spoken in previous blog posts about experimenting in interweaving, but weaving different coloured cut outs together. This felt like an interesting way I could use this idea without destroying another piece of work.
I feel like it worked very well, although it isn’t immediately clear that the piece has been tampered with and inter woven until you look closely. When the piece is help up it becomes much clearer as the paper layers don’t separate as they have before, instead staying seemingly stuck together. The overall effect of the interweaving is definitely understated. Most viewers would assume that it could separate into different layers just like my other designs.
I used normal pritt stick glue as the glue didn’t need to be particularly strong when so many areas were glued together and I also needed a material that would dry quickly, transparently and wouldn’t be obvious as I felt that it would unnecessarily draw attention to those joints in a way I didn’t want.
While the obviousness of the joining would make it more clear with a different sort of glue, I also thought it would weigh it down if it was glued with a hot glue gun glue, although it would dry more quickly, and I couldn’t use pva glue as the drying time would be too long, I would look control over how much glue would be on each area, but it would have dried transparently.
I have many ideas in mind for my future works, all of which this blog has helped to inspire me, helped me experiment with and helped me reflect on.
Firstly I will be working with Solid colours interacting with Patterns and overlapping each other as my experiments in the past have shown me that this is a very good thing and works very well and looks good too. It can be extremely versatile and extend my work beyond its very simple boundaries that its currently at.
Second I will be experimenting with interweaving the paper cuts, very much like a weave that you would find in textiles. I feel this could especially work if the paper cut were square in shape and would also look good against the solid colouring that I will be experimenting with.
And Thirdly I will be experimenting with 3-Dimensional shapes and lighting. To me there is no reason why my work should always be flat and 2-Dimensional as it can go further than that. Because of how intricate my pattern are it lends my paper flexibility that it didn’t have before allowing me to work it into shapes that it couldn’t be in previously and I feel it would look interesting to the viewer to view the paper cut at different angles rather than just flat.
I feel this also can be helped by my looking into architecture as that isn’t viewed as flat either and it would be an interesting comparison.
So these are the tasks I shall be working on for the next few months and hopefully will work and be present in my degree show.
When looking back at my past works and how my work has developed in the past year has really made me appreciate how far I’ve come in my medium and how much further I can go.
When I first began it was with quite simple cut outs, usually inspired by nature or clockwork and was always on a singular layer. I found it very difficult at the time as I had never worked within the paper cutting medium before and it took quite a while to grasp at the different papers that I could use, the different techniques available to me and also the different tools available to me.
The sharpness of my scalpel became incredibly important on how precisely I could cut out each piece, and the thickness of the paper also.
If the paper was very thin, such as newsprint at 45gsm (the thickness of the paper) which I used in some of my earlier work, then it was much more likely to tear and break even when the scalpel was incredibly sharp just because I myself could not put very much pressure on the paper.
Whereas I also experimented with very thick paper, slightly thicker than card and found that I was damaging my wrist because of the pressure I was having to exert on the paper just to get the scalpel through it, often having to cut over the same line 2 or 3 times. This blunted my scalpels much more quickly and when using disposable ones they snapped, becoming useless even if they were not blunt yet.
At the end of my first year of using the papercutting technique I was becoming very bored with the influence of nature on my paper cuts and found that concept very limiting. Through this I explored different options and found that Pattern would become my new choice as it was practically limitless on what I could create with a pattern.
I also started using Colour this year instead of staying in the Black and White niche that I had put myself into. Colour has given me an amazing platform to work from as I can convey the colour choice into my concept. Using jewel like tones to give the appearance of a more islamic inspiration, or more muted colours for a gothic inspiration.
I have also begun looking at modern architecture as inspiration as pattern is used constantly not just in the appearance of the building, but the actual design and construction of it too.
