2008 ad: UCF Staff Show

I've got some work showing at The Poly, Church Street, Falmouth as part of 2008 ad, a show of staff work from University College Falmouth. The show's on from Monday 25th February to Saturday 1st March, 10am - 4pm.

Chiaroscuro vol. II

Behave © Lizzie Ridout 2008

'Soon his shadow was behaving properly, though still a little creased.'
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

One of the most magnificent books ever written. You think you know the story, but re-read the original text and be blown away by Barrie's wistful portrait of childhood and the imaginary versus adulthood and the real.

Sketch for a poster and postcard in the making. In fact the text will be partially cut out of the paper, not black, in order to let the letters fold forward. Shadows of shadows. The reverse of the sheet will be printed in a solid fluorescent, so that when raised from the wall, the sheet will appear to 'glow' and hover off the surface.

More when they're cut.

Scissor Tales

'Marie' with flowers, H.C. Andersen, 1874. The Hans Laage-Petersen Collection, The Royal Library, Copenhagen.

Bouquet holder & butterfly with dancers, H.C. Andersen, 1874. The Hans Laage-Petersen Collection, The Royal Library, Copenhagen.

Brazilian newspaper man, Hans Christian Andersen, 1830. The Hans Christian Andersen Museum, Odense.

Woman in fancy dress, Hans Christian Andersen. The Hans Christian Andersen Museum, Odense.

Hans Christian Andersen. Blinding. To me he was just the famous name behind the fairy tales until I heard about the paper cuts that he created whilst telling stories to the children of the hosts with whom he stayed. He didn't own his own house and spent a lot of time as a guest with other families, being invited into high society homes (he was born and raised in slums in Odense) to entertain and tell everyone stories.

The best part of all is that he had incredibly large hands and created all of the above using an equally huge pair of scissors. Interestingly the stories that he told and the cuts that he created simultaneously, never related: he wouldn't tell a fairy tale about swans and cut swans from the sheet, the paper-cut would always be a complete surprise. And unlike the other silhouette cutters of that time, he always created his pieces in white paper, or anything else he could find, but never black.

For more information follow the above links to Andersen's work in various collections (The Hans Laage-Petersen Collection at The Royal Library, Copenhagen is particularly good).

It's also worth having a look at the 2005 Penguin Classics edition of Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, which has been published with some of the paper-cuts as illustrations.

A basic life story written for kids, but with a pretty thorough collection of images can be found in The Amazing Paper Cuttings of Hans Christian Andersen by Beth Wagner Brust.

Double Absence

Photos: Gunwalloe Church, Cornwall 2008 © Lizzie Ridout

A new collection. Suitably morbid I'd agree. But how unbelievably poignant: at the passing of your husband or wife, to leave space on the headstone for your own time. The blank-paged book is particularly heart-wrenching.

Chiaroscuro

Image © Lizzie Ridout

'A word is true to its shadow.'

'And now I'll say farewell. Here's my card. I live on the sunny side, and I'm always home when it rains.'

The Shadow, Hans Christian Andersen

After a day at the beach collecting my own shadows, I made these. Quick ideas for a series of paperworks I'm currently battling with. I have some other plans for what the text actually says…

Images © Lizzie Ridout

Skia, the ancient Greek for shadow. Also meaning trace.
In medieval Arabic, the word for shadow is the follower.
In American sign language, shadow is black stain.
The German schatt derives from the Greek skot, indicating obscurity.

With the assistance of Roberto Casati and his book Shadows: Unlocking Their Secrets, from Plato to Our Time.

The Mexico Chapters: Museo Nacional de Antropología

Whereas the paper flags seen in Mexico are now made from tissue paper, and more frequently plastic, the art of papel picado is pre-Hispanic in origin and can be traced right back to the Aztecs. Mulberry bark was used to make a form of rough textured paper called amatl. Amatl was transformed into codices, offerings and ritual paper clothing. Similarly to modern-day Mexican practices, flags and banners were also made to decorate streets, temples, homes and fields for religious ceremonies.

These paper-cuts photographed at the Museo Nacional de Antropología are representations of gods and natural spirits created by 'healers' praying for rain or to cure diseases. In the photograph above, the focus of the paper display is a napkin or bed (a square patterned piece) around which all the other figures are placed. A lovely concept.

Photos © Lizzie Ridout

The Mexico Chapters: Introduction

Coyoacan papercut, Mexico. Photo © Lizzie Ridout

Coyoacan papercut, Mexico. Photo © Lizzie Ridout

A long overdue label called Peregrinations:The Mexico Chapters has been added to Art Sparklets as - almost a year on - I continue to process all that I saw whilst I was in Mexico. The three week trip - part funded by Creative Skills - was fleeting and left me delighted, shocked, baffled and intrigued.

The reason it has taken so long to get something up here was not due to laziness on my part, more a need to reflect on how what I had experienced could be put to good use in terms of my own work. Interestingly I wrote my proposal, quite confident that I knew what effect the trip was likely to have on me. However the reality was vastly different and although I did follow up a lot of the initial research I had done in the UK, you just can't predict what will inspire you or how, when you are actually in a place. So I had to deviate from my list of best-laid plans and just follow my gut instinct. I can't believe I forgot about the element of chance!

Mexico is special: it's frustrating and vibrant and fake and real all at once. It's magical and harsh and tantalising and impossible. And I needed some time to think about how to begin to capture some of these qualities in my own work. So this is where I begin to commit the thoughts and parts of the collections I made whilst there into something more tangible. It seems particularly pertinent when I'm also working on new pieces about shadows that grapple with paper engineering and cutting.

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This banner was saved away in my plan-chest simply because of its wonderful text. The banner is just under 1.5 metres long and cut in tissue using fierritos or chisels hit with hammers, through up to 50 sheets of tissue at a time. Coyoacan is a district in the south of Mexico City. The skeletal figure is La Catrina.

La Catrina © Jose Guadalupe Posada