3 DUMB TIGERS (2016)

This project was my own take on the 3 wise monkey concept; see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The materials used were: 180 GSM paper, hot glue, acrylic paint and acrylic based neon paint. With the addition of an ultraviolet light to illuminate the paint.

Where they are not finished to a high standard, the painterly textures that the brush strokes created, makes the tigers seem less digressive, especially as they've lost few of their essential elements used to survive.

The technique used to create the tigers is called Pepakura; the art of cutting, folding and gluing paper together to create 3 dimensional structures. Next the tigers are coated in papier mâché to create a stronger structure. Then they're painted to complete the final sculpture.

I chose to mount these on the walls with wooden backboards, as they were originally designed to be. I had thought about adhering two together and suspending them or putting them on a plinth, but felt they deserved to be shown in a submissive context, as if they had been hunted.

The template can be found here; https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/PlainPapyrus

Sculptures

Paper Crane Sunflower (2015)

This project was created by accident after creating a massive ball of cranes, the materials used are purely paper, hot glue and acrylic paint.

My inspiration came from Sadako Sasaki, a girl who was unfortunately in Hiroshima during world war 2, and the story about her creating 1,000 paper cranes before she sadly passed away. Although she could not fold all 1,000 in the time, her classmates and family continued her work in the hopes of peace across all of Japan and the world. I folded approximately 250 and wanted a way to store all of them together in different sizes. The pattern on the ball is purely random but the stripes of the cranes are all the same size.

The sunflower element came in later after comments that the ball looked like a flower. I only decided to paint half so that people could see the raw nature of the simplistic paper crane shapes. In hindsight, I would've painted the cranes before sticking them together, but inspiration can come before or after a project.