A bit of Inspiration...

Richard Sweeney himself..

This is some of Richard Sweeney's beautifully crafted work. 

Richard Sweeney is a paper sculpture who exploits the process of hands-on manipulation, feeling the paper's properties and exploring it's behaviour. 

 I think is one of his most well known sculptures. His work generally involves repetitive geometry, curved lines and modularity, looking at a shapes components and seeing how they can be separated and recombined.

There is a very clear structure in a lot of Sweeney's work, he uses a lot of repetition in his sculptures and designs. I think the results of his work are elegant and mysterious, and also very impressive!
Seeing his work and having him here to do workshops with us is very inspiring for me!

Previously on my Foundation course, we did a project loosely based on Sweeney's work, looking at repetition in using paper/card shapes.

This was my shape, which has previously been slightly different, but due to not using any other material, i.e. glue or tape, it had fallen apart several times before I managed to photograph it.

 But I still think I got some good photos using my model (Edwin Pascual) I think from this project I learned a little about how to photograph my work differently, to make something quite dull look more interesting.

Other artists that use paper... 
       Rob Ryan. 

 I ABSOLUTELY LOVE  Rob Ryan's style. His beautiful, delicate, magical paper cuts are amazing! His work touches on the romantic realms of thoughts and dreams, and loneliness and longing. They look so fragile and actually quite difficult to do! Especially with all the text he puts in. I would LOVE to do something more like this for my project.

Chris Natrop's work it also quite similar to Rob Ryan's, although he does more larger scale pieces, mostly site specific installations. He does his work with no predetermined drawings or designs. This spontaneous approach lends freedom to the patterns. Could I try this? I think so!

This work reminded me of another project that I had done previously on my Foundation course. We did two paper cuts based on chosen lines or paragraphs from Dylan Thomas' poem, 'A Winter's Tale'.

"Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow.."

"And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer.."

I really enjoyed doing this project, although all that cutting out with the scalpel doesn't half hurt your fingers!
In this project I was restricted to an A4 piece of paper, it would nice to try doing something similar in a much larger scale.