Imagined Spaces

My mind is full of created paper shapes. Shapes I want to draw, shapes I want to experience. The process of forming them sculpturally with my own hands has drawn me closer to them. I feel they have huge potential. Damien Hirst said it was the limitless possibilities of art that messed with his head, who'd have thought a simple sheet of paper could do this to you too!




I feel you could work multiple lifetimes and not extract the best and the most from a simple blank sheet.

My thoughts turn to scale and I begin to imagine spaces that scaled-up versions of my shapes could inhabit.

They become vast landscapes: glaciers, mountains. I want to try and convey the monolithic qualities they possess. What about a paper cathedral? A non-denominational space for the viewer to paint with their own vision.

This is a public space I find exceptionally inspiring and I wonder how much it is informing my current fascination. It's a site specific installation by Rachel Whiteread, The Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. Its straight lines and uncompromising mass are so stilling. Where there is weight and balance and stasis there is also sterility and a sense of something inescapable, like a concrete prison cell with bars that cannot be broken. The greyness of the whole scene strikes me strongly, as if colour daren't intrude. The structure is the negative space within a library rendered positive, so you think of books but find out that somehow you can never read the stories contained within them. Such concrete negative space operates upon me as if the air has been sucked out of the room.

I begin to think about how to render my paper structures in virtual spaces...