Canvas to the Imagination

In March of next year I will be creating an installation at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto for If Walls Could Talk. This site-specific installation will be a collaboration between myself and Bruce Alcock, the Creative Director of Global Mechanic. Our project is called Canopy and will combine many different elements from yarn drawings, to paper sculptures, along with digital projection, and sound elements.

I began work on this project in September and have been sharing my progress on Instagram. To date I’ve been working on producing multiples of maple leaves cut from white paper, which will be suspended from the ceiling. For once I am not cutting these by hand (because that would be crazy), but instead have been using a digital cutter.

The ceiling in my apartment has been the stand-in space for my explorations in how to assemble and suspend the leaf clusters from the ceiling. The leaves are cut individually, and then fitted together during hanging. It looks beautiful.

A variation of this same process has been to come up with a composition of paper wings that will eventually evolve into a lantern. The image here is of a small hand-cut rough I did to mock up the idea.

I eventually created larger more refined wing shapes for the digital cutter to produce, and assembled these in a similar fashion to the maple leaf clusters. The bottom image is of a prototype I mocked up and is hanging in my dining room so I can contemplate its further development.

This project is very different than anything I’ve worked on previously. I sometimes find the scale of it staggering, because there are a long list of elements that still need to be made. It’s also been a bit weird working on something with a long term production schedule, versus the short term gratification of small projects I am used to.

Back in July I began a side project involving the creation of small individual paper cut pieces that resemble flowers or fireworks. Since then I’ve been slowly working away at this at irregular intervals with the goal of making as many as I can.

All these months later an I have made about eighty of these flowery bits, and I intend to keep going. They are cut from drawing paper painted with blue ink and each is about 3.5″ inches wide. It’s very satisfying to see the tiny pile of them grow.

The idea behind this is to create something larger from these small pieces. At the moment I’m not yet sure what form this will take or how these will all come together, but it will eventually be a striking installation.

For now my goal is to create one hundred and figure things out from there. Stay tuned for more updates…

The selection of animals I am choosing for this series is a bit random, but I’m okay with that. I’m basing my choices on animals I like, but also one ones I think will translate well into the medium of paper cutting.

When I first made this owl I didn’t really like him, but his grumpy little face grew on me. I think owls lend themselves nicely to a composition full of circles.

The finished size for this is 12″ x 12″. I decided to make two layers of circle cut paper instead of three because it gets trickier to fit the pieces together at this larger size. I’ve also started to collect the pieces of circular paper I cut away because I may use them for another idea.

The grumpy owl was joined yesterday by an elegant paper cut crow, and a as yet unfinished little fox. The list of circles and animals in the series is slowly growing.