Works Biography Contact News
Mobius Selfridges Flagship Store, London Menu Next
A series of sculptural works in paper commissioned by Selfridges for display in the flagship store windows, Orchard Street, London.
I had an idea of the kinds of form I wanted to produce- flowing, twisted and asymmetric, akin to diagrams of protein structures or twisted geometric figures such as the Möbius strip. An interesting aspect of this work is that the form of the pleated paper is dictated by the manner in which it is suspended. Without the selective effect of gravity maintaining the volume of the piece, it would simply collapse and revert to a flat form (proteins become denatured when heated above a particular threshold, losing their three dimensional shape thus their function).My interest lies in the manipulation of the material and how best I can preserve its nature while exploring form and volume. It is the tactile quality that drives me, I find it difficult to work with something unless I can hold it in my hands, touching and bending the material to feel how it behaves.Hand-made, paper models were used to generate the form of the pieces, combined with the use of 3D Studio Max for further refinement. The virtual model was then exported as a flat layout, which was printed and folded directly to create 1:10 scale models. These small models were suspended in a mock-up model of the window space to test the behavior of the pleated sheet when suspended.
After further tests with full scale models, the final layout was used to route an acrylic jig, which was used as a template for transferring the score-lines to the paper. A total of thirty six sheets were hand scored and pleated over three days.
In the window space, the sheets were glued end-to-end to create continuous lengths. The tension in the sheets caused by the angled pleat allowed them to be suspended in a natural manner- that is to say they were not forced into any particular configuration, but arranged according to the behavior of the sheet.
