Artist Marianne Eriksen-Scott Hansen creates “paper couture” featuring larger-than-life blooms crafted from tissue paper. The thin sheets of color are gathered and trimmed to form petals and leaves that, while solid objects, have an ethereal quality to them. It’s as if they are fixtures in a candy-hued dreamscape.
Experimentation is a central focus of Hansen’s paper creations. “I have rarely let myself be dictated by tradition or convention in my work with paper (or any given material),” she tells My Modern Met. “I work artistically and intuitively but with the foundation of a very wide and life-long crafts experience.” Her knowledge of construction techniques, for instance, allows her to interpret a material while developing new approaches for how to use it. “It’s all in the hands so to speak. I want to enter into a dialogue with the material. Work my way into it. Exploring rather than ‘mere' re-working and investigation. Seeing how far you can ‘stretch' paper.”
In crafting her own version of blooms, Hansen recognizes how her process mimics nature itself. “Numerous little individual parts that make up a whole, from cell to organism,” she says, “micro to macro. Contrasts, symmetry, harmony. By my hand, the paper is returned to the organic material from which it originates. It is given the tactility and texture to resemble wood, plant parts, papyrus. I treat the paper firmly as it were rope, bark, branches. Or delicately like dried grass or porous petals.”
Artist Marianne Eriksen-Scott Hansen creates oversized ethereal flowers out of tissue paper.
