Paper Craft
Maggie Puckett
My work is interdisciplinary, combining art and science to explore the complicated history and future of anthropogenic effects on the Earth’s systems. Through handmade paper, artist’s books, and environmental works my practice navigates our planet from atmosphere to core, examining ecological history and visualizing predictions of future global change. My work encourages the audience to look, touch, smell, and taste, providing an experiential introduction to the complexities of ecology. My practice is more than environmental art; it is a political statement, a rejection of industrial modes of production and an embrace of hand papermaking as a worthy artistic medium. Through hand papermaking, in the words of William Morris, I seek to “help to keep alive memories of the past which are necessary elements of the life of the future, and methods of work which no society could afford to lose.”* The work exists at the intersection of art and science, or more specifically, of community and environment. In art and life, the embrace of the handmade vs. machine-made is an anti-capitalist gesture with strong ties to Environmentalism, both seeking “the general movement towards freedom of life for all,”* humans and non-humans alike.
Rogan Brown
My work plays with the architecture of nature and organic growth. By identifying patterns and motifs that occur in the natural world in different contexts and at different scales, both macroscopic and microscopic, I have developed a formal, aesthetic vocabulary that I use to construct hybrid sculptural forms, half real, half surreal.
Paper Torso
The paper torso project began in 2011 when I took up a suggestion by Ms. Joanne Nakora from the International School Nadi in the Fiji Islands to design and build a torso with removable organs. 3 months later I had completed a first version and uploaded some images to my Flickr account. In January 2012 My Modern Met blogged about it which led to many requests to make the templates available.