Paperworks
These sculptures are made from plastic discarded / collected from the streets of Montreal (PQ) over a one month period. The paper, which has also been previously consumed is mulched in an ordinary blender and sprayed, layer upon layer, onto the plastic until the matrix of paper fibres is strong enough to hold everything together. There are no adhesives added to the paper.
The Paper-works series began as an exploration of material. At the time, I was completing graduate school and looking to combine materials with detritus plastic to establish new relationships with material and to employ different processes of 'making'. As such, it seemed a logical next step to explore the dichotomy between everlasting, man-made materials and the (formerly?) organic, easily decomposed paper. Despite the fact that the wood fiber has been manipulated to serve our purposes, it is still a clean transformation of one object into another possibility. The distortion challenges the viewer to reappraise the objects beneath and the space in which it exists.
The previous years had witnessed sculptures that challenged our common notions of materials through a comparison between plastic (as an element) and geological processes. These paper works are also a continuation of this line of thought, principally through the accumulative process of the layers of paper onto plastic With the exception of Asylum (named so because of the similarity of the piece to the grid-like padded cell), the other works have simply been named by for various geological phenomens, an allusion to the longevity of the synthetic material, the sedimentary sculptural process, and our society's detachment from materials that last while objects themselves fail.