beautiful things: laura cooperman

all images by laura cooperman, from paper cuttings.

i think laura cooperman‘s work is extraordinary.  i love paper-based art practice (as i may have mentioned before) but cooperman’s work gets one better, combining hyper-delicate paper structures with cogs and moving parts.

i love mechanical things in general, but the use of grimy masculine clockwork and gear chains, alongside diaphanous architectural-type buildings is, i think, brilliant.  it’s a little bit steampunk in feel, and though the white offsets the connection with modern starkness, i can’t help getting a feeling remeniscent of the response i had when watching the mysterious geographic explorations of jasper morello, with its shadow-world of profile figures, and translucent machines.

in her bio cooperman cites a fascination with ’living space and its affects on the human psyche’, but i wonder whether the inclusion of mechanical apperati and real moving parts goes deeper than that, to explore the machinations – psychic and machine – that go on beneath a city and the spaces built for human beings to dwell in.

beautiful things: eva wylie and sally smart

eva wylie, close to (near berserk), silkscrene of fabric and mixed media, philadelphia international airport, 2006.

today i am enamoured of the work of philidelphian eva wylie, who does a mixture of collage, installation, and walpaper-art – this last being something i particularly love, and come across rarely. (i found wylie via oh joy! - lucky me)

sally smart, the exquisite pirate, 2004-7

the first ‘wallpaper-artist’ i discovered was sally smart, and i’ve been enchanted ever since (i saw one of her works for the exquisite pirate just the other day).  it’s such an under-utilised medium, and such a delicate and intriguing mixture of the tactile and the two-dimensional.   it’s also an art-form that is very ‘feminine’ – or at least designated as such – because of it’s obvious roots in the ’domestic’ and ‘decorative’ arts; but smart’s work is exhibited in some of the most prestigeous galleries in the world, which is pretty amazing when you think about it, and a pretty brilliantly subtle appropriation of public space through ‘private’ (ie, ‘feminine’) art.

i quite love…

these:

by X♥ on etsy.