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.

this is not the most cheerful post (and it has a trigger warning)

in fact this article has many trigger-warnings.  it involves rape, rapists, rape-methodology, and rape-supportive culture.  however.  it involves these things because it is a discussion of some new – pretty revolutionary – research being done on the topic of undetected, unincarcerated rapists.  if you can handle the triggers, it’s well worth reading.  not least because it doesn’t leave you with the same sick inevitable feeling one tends to get reading pretty much everything people write about rape.  in fact…this article actually finishes with some pretty awesome points on how undetected rape could be combatted in a very every-day manner (and again, this is sort of revolutionary; if only because this is rape we’re talking about, and we’re doing so in a culture which supports it, so communicating Things That Can Be Done To Change This is a pretty big deal).

so again.  if you can…you should read this.  it’s interesting.  and more than that, it’s not only relevant, it’s positive and maybe even helpful:

predator theory.

wonder of wonders.