Paper Sculpture

We were prompted to summarize our last semester as students in one word, and the word I chose was 'grey.' In this piece, in both title and subject matter, I am trying to portray world as I saw in the last few months. The barren trees and scraggy underbrush illustrate the way the woods have looked until very recently: bare, without snow. The rolling nature of the base of this piece suggests a small earthquake, or at the very least unstable ground. These past few months have been rather crazy in this country, with an incredibly important election and a storming of the Capitol building, all during a global pandemic. Now, the title of this piece very much reflects this. November is quite possibly the most miserable month, where it is cold, but not cold enough for the ponds to freeze or for snow to fall. It is a month of grey-ness. The elections in this country also take place in November, and in this crazy year they were even more important and tumultuous, echoing back to the rolling of the ground. But despite all of this going on, these things felt far away, remote. I haven't had anyone in my immediate family get COVID-19, no one I have ever met has died from it and while the election results reached home, they still felt muted, quiet, grey.

This piece was created using paper and glue and scissors. I found this simplicity of material really interesting and fun to work with, as my two dimensional work typically involves watercolor and around twenty-five to thirty different colored pencils. I struggled only with my gluing technique, where the smaller pieces of paper would get stuck to my fingers and I would have to gently pry them off and go wash my hands.

Something I could benefit from is to do more research when first planning out a piece, perhaps doing study sketches or even consulting reference materials. For this piece, I examined the way barren trees felt, where dying ones are stark, with only a few branches, healthy trees, waiting for their leaves, can look almost fuzzy at a distance. I chose to make trees with fewer branches, both to help with cutting, but also to allow a lot of space for the branches of different trees to overlap, creating interesting shapes for the eye.