Paper Stacking

Objective:
Observation through sight and touch as well as invention and development of individual idea. Introduce subtractive and additive processes.

Materials:
Four sheets of Rives gray paper, wood glue, scissors, exacto, a vegetable or fruit for observation purposes

So once again it was Chelsea vs. Paper. I'd like to think the battle was a tie. The paper won round one but victory was mine in round two!

This project began with painfully cutting out shape after shape after shape from the thick rives paper. Scissors, exacto knife, box cutter; it didn't matter what I used. My hands were killing me. After cutting all the pieces out I glued and stacked them. The final shape was very strange looking. I started using sand paper because power tools are a little bit scary and I've heard horror stories about the sander. Eventually my hand cramped from holding the stacked paper form and my other hand began to burn from sanding it with sand paper for so long. Although my intention was to make an orange the paper decided it wanted to be a hybrid orange lemon, or lorange. I accepted the defeat only because my hands could not take the pain any longer.

Round two was much more successful for me. I started off with a shell my boyfriend gave me. That made me think of a fish. So I cut out a fish shape and started stacking. But just a fish wouldn't be that interesting. I cut a rectangular slit in the middle of the fish a glued a vertical paper structure in the shape of seaweed into it. After that, the structure looked a little unbalanced. I made more rectangular slits on each fin and glued on more seaweed. Only these pieces arc and fold into the center piece. This piece makes me think of the ocean and how mysterious it is. It makes me think about how many things in nature can look like one thing but be something completely different, or hide within another creature. I painted this piece with shades of green and blue to reflect a beachy and somewhat mysterious feel.

Experimental Drawings