When Brooklyn transplant Jane South rides her bike around the city, she takes in the sights a bit differently than your average Londoner in New York. South became fascinated with the way structures looked coming towards her and moving away from her as she rode and soon began to translate what she saw into her folded, constructed paper sculptures.
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Long Wheeled Construction, hand-cut and folded-paper, ink, acrylic and balsa
54″ x 168″ x 19″
Long Wheeled Construction, detail
She paints the paper first with acrylic paints, adding detailed line drawings on top of the paint. Next, South hand cuts the spaces between the lines before stretching the paper over thin pieces of balsa wood. Light and shadow play are important elements in the imaginary urban industrialscapes.
Red Square, hand-cut and folded paper, ink, acrylic and balsa, 63″ x 73″ x 12″
Red Square, detail
Most of my work draws on the experience of riding my bicycle around the city. When I first moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn, I was living amongst the remnants of 19th-century industrial architecture–wharves, cranes and windowless warehouses–and the burgeoning technological infrastructures of the twenty-first–giant satellite dishes, cable terminals…things that I don’t know the names of…these structures were right on the doorstep so I encountered them in all their structural mass and enormity, but by the time I was cycling over the Brooklyn Bridge, they appeared on the horizon as tiny and delicate linear structures. It is this constant shifting of perspective and scale that constitutes our actual phenomenological experience of architecture and the city and that I aim to get across, the moving through and around structures, the fluidity of our architectural experience. Jane South, from an interview on identitytheory.com
Tower, hand-cut and folded paper, ink, acrylic and wood, 15′ x 6′ x 5′
Tower, detail
The artist, who holds a BA in Theater Set and Costume Design from Central School of Art in London and an MFA in Painting and Sculpture from the University of North Carolina, recently exhibited Tower (seen above – more images here) in NYC, her largest and most ambitious work to date.
Susanne Vielmetter of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects talks about South’s process in this video.
Here’s a short video that brings you up close to South’s most recent installation at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York (no sound).
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many thanks for featuring my work on your blog – one important correction though, the paper is NOT stretched over thin pieces of balsa wood, it is just cut paper. The only balsa used is in the truss-like elements of the work, it is not used as an underlying structure.
Thanks for the correction Jane – I’m not sure now where I read that it was stretched over the balsa wood, but I know that I read it in my research – so glad you saw the post and set the record straight!
Your work is amazing – can’t wait to see where you take it next.