Let Me Be Your {paper} Fantasy...

Art and design is continuously inspired and influenced by past events, personal, social and geographical history. Events that happen to us - personally or that effect us form afar, and maybe not even in the same period of time as our existence.

I even preach this to my students. It's a key element of creativity. As humans we have the internal need to contextualise the situations we face each day. We create narratives and stories to help us make sense of the world.

In a strange and coincidental moment of serendipity tonight, just before I was leaving work, I attempted to file away some papers {the mountain had started to block out sunlight} and I came across my own personal archive of...me, basically. Me the artist. An aspect of me that had been stored away as I embraced and celebrated family life.

Years ago in the midst of my degree I formed a good cognitive habit of documenting and filing evidence of all my work, so flicking through the slides was magical, I went back in time, it brought back a lot of thoughts and creative questions, that even though as artists we ask ourselves if they have been resolved and laid to rest or  have they simply stopped at interesting places.

One of the series' of works I came across was from the last year of my degree, my Paper Fantasy series... This series of work began with the concept of a labour of love, the paper corsets were an ironic statement of fragility and liberation intertwined.
The most seductive element of the pieces for me was the readily available and constant supply of the banal paper, lined paper, sugar paper, for years I have harboured a secret love of quite simply... paper {I still do now} As you can see in these images of the work, there are strong connotations towards performance...who know's maybe it will catch on and become a trend...until then, I think I will keep it as one of my guilty pleasures...