I am always amazed by the power of paper. Something so thin it can be crumpled and tossed away, yet so sharp it can easily cut you like a knife. Something that words can be written on, inked into a page to declare love or war, joy or sadness. Something that can be folded into an intricate design of origami styled folds, yet easily shredded to bits.
On a walk down Carnaby Street yesterday we wandered into one of my favorite stores, Liberty’s. Downstairs in the Carnaby room there was a Roger La Borde display with pieces by Rob Ryan and 3 other artist.
All artist who use paper as their means of artistic interpretation. One of the artist was Su Blackwell. I could not stop staring at her pieces, the intricacies and delicate nature of her work was beautiful. One piece on display was a flurry of butterflies coming out of a book, the beautiful colors of some of them against the written words were like little beams of light shooting through a black night.
Another piece of hers existed with trees popping out of an open book, I wanted to jump into those pages, there was a fairytale magic to it. Other artists included Elise Hurst who created two “Mondoodles” for the show and Nelly Dimitranova who doodled all over paint chip leaflets. Rob Ryan had two huge images there, one of a lovely little house with angels on the roof and the words spoke of them watching over the house and everything around it, I really liked that.
All the pieces were made of paper. It is something that is so simple, just paper. But, it wasn’t “just paper”, no, it held in its fibres so much more.
(Alas, I forgot my lovely camera in the rush to catch a train and our phones decided not to help us take lovely pictures, so these images were taken from Roger la Borde’s & Rob Ryan’s site.)
