Review of Papercuts 10 July — 7 August, 2003 Faculty of Art & Design Gallery Monash University A Monash University Museum of Art exhibition Curated by Natasha Bullock and Katerina Paseta
Published in Imprint Vol 38 No 3 Spring 2003
'The division of the continuous ought not to be considered as that of sand into grains, but as that of a sheet of paper... into folds, in such a way that there can be an infinite number of folds, one smaller than the next, without the body ever dissolving into points or minima.'1
Paper is a network of organic fibres, tangled or irregular in comparison to the regular grid of textiles. Consider the topology of paper, the ways that it might be considered as a surface subject to manipulation.2 What is the vocabulary of forms by which we recognise paper, its material address, its distinguishing characteristics? Paper compared to fabric will assume very few topologies. It doesn't stretch and it's not easily distorted. The cone, the cylinder, the sine-wave, the spiral — that's about it before paper must cut, crease or crumple.
In the West the history of paper as pure material lacks richness. Paper, supporting the archive of culture, is an Atlas who bears up text in all its forms, yet whose own voice is mute. The codex, the concertina, the stack and the scroll are the carriers of language and image. Compare the myriad swags, swirls and knots of cloth, with its vertical fluting and its horizontal sagging. Celebrated with such delight and profusion in art history, cloth is a mine of invaginations so rich that postmodernity can hardly exhaust it. Paper is impoverished stuff by comparison. Yet these very constraints of rigidity and stiffness give paper-as-matter an austere formal grace, as demonstrated in Papercuts, a selection of paper-based works by emerging and established artists from Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart.
If 'papery' as a metaphor equates to 'flimsy', 'fragile' or 'insubstantial', paper when cut, folded and glued transforms from flimsy to boxy and rigid, even as it still retains something of its organic origins in its imperfect flatness, its propensity to sag and bulge. Perverse then for paper to mock crystal in Damiano Bertoli's The Diamond Age (Franco Cozzo's best chandelier in pasteboard), and Thomas Deverall's Untitled, neatly built cardboard-crystalline forms. Both works lack the luminosity and gravitas of gem or glass, replacing it with an estranging lumpish muteness.
Louise Paramor's works are the most ambitious in Papercuts. Black Snake is a Loch Ness Monster of increasing (or diminishing?) diameter whose visceral excess knots and flops on the floor; Untitled hovers in the air, a glorious throbbing red and pink Chinese lantern. There is a beautiful rhythmic momentum in the way that their honeycomb construction catches the light. They mimic organic patterns - the scales of a snake, the centre of a daisy - and, as Leibniz suggests, natural geometries betray the pervasive presence of mathematics.
Andrea Tu's obsessively constructed curtain of paper snakes Zapp falls from the ceiling in a great fluoro-yellow and white waterfall to foam on the floor. At the opposite end of the scale to Paramor's and Tu's coils are Eugene Carchesio's Untitled matchboxes, their fragile insides exposed through violent intervention on a miniature scale. Also a miniature, Natasha Frisch's Stabbing at the station is a translucent suburban vanitas.
In contrast to these boxy and floppy works there are the cutouts which make little claim to three-dimensionality. In Megan Keating's All Quiet on the Western Front uniformed/uniform soldiers stride across a wall, their silhouettes and camouflage splotches creating a metaphoric figure/ground confusion. Sangeeta Sandrasegar's glittering cut-outs sit elegantly on their shadows. Based on cultural myths of the snake-lady, they are part Wayang Kulit, part Aubrey Beardsley. Kate Cotching's stack and topple is a delicate paper community, mobile, suspended and subject to the breeze of change.
'Ventilated by the wind, it is no longer the fold of matter through which one sees, but the fold of the soul in which one reads.' 3 The emphasis in Papercuts on the integrity of its modest material gives this exhibition a tender, fragile appeal.
Notes 1 GW Leibniz 'Placidus Philatheli' Opuscules 614-5, quoted in Gilles Deleuze 'The Fold' trans. Jonathan Strauss Yale French Studies 80/1991, 231 2 Topology is a branch of geometry describing the properties of a figure that are unaffected by continuous distortion, such as stretching or knotting. 3 Deleuze op. cit. 237