Creating Sculpture from Paper Cutting - Nahoko Kojima - Artist Review
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Kojima lies under her piece 'Byaku'
Creating Sculpture from Paper Cutting - Nahoko Kojima - Artist Review
Nahoko Kojima is a Japanese paper artist who creates giant papercuts from single sheets of Japanese Washi paper, and then hangs them so that the way they fall creates a 3D sculpture.
One of her most famous pieces is Byaku, a life-sized polar bear which took 7 months to make from a single 3 metre square piece of Japanese Washi paper.
'Byaku' is painstakingly suspended in the air from many clear threads.
Another of her pieces is Cloud Leopard, which, like many of her other pieces, has toured extensively and been shown in numerous different galleries. Paper is such a delicate medium, all that installing (hanging from hundreds of clear threads), dismantling, transporting (flat?), not to mention dusting (!) must take its toll on the paper! Kojima smartly says that she loves how the paper ‘changes over time’ which is perhaps a clever way to admit that it’s not going to stay totally perfect. Goodness - after spending months and months cutting a piece, I can only imagine what a bum-clenching feeling it must be to hang it!
'Cloud Leopard' in situ
Check out the below YouTube video of Kojima as she’s hanging the Cloud Leopard. It’s wonderful to get a 3D idea of the piece.
Although she appears to have started out rather traditionally with her paper cuts (see ‘Kiku Flowers’) Kojima is now proclaimed as ‘pioneering’ in her technique of hanging large-scale paper cuts so they end up as 3D, sculptural works of art rather than remaining the flat piece of paper they were cut from.
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