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I have worked with paper for many years and the texture, material memory, strength and fragility of the material are ingrained in me as a practitioner. It is a tactile, warm, immediate material with which to work and one with which we are all familiar. I am interested in exploring its materiality alongside our tacit understanding of paper as a means of communicating information. I use papercutting to do this, using a scalpel to cut by hand and create 3-dimensional forms that explore and amplify this relationship between material and information.

The physical act of cutting puts me in touch with the surface of the paper and the feel of the blade as it cuts through the fibres within. Folding and manipulating the cut paper into 3-dimensional forms highlights the change in its integrity as it is cut, scored, formed, layered, obscured. The 3-dimensional form reveals more about the paper; we see the edges of the cut paper, how it is bound to the printed words and two sides of the same page are revealed at once.

The alteration of recognisable cultural documents such as maps and books, that ordinarily call for the viewer to place themselves within them, enables me to explore personal experiences within a collective context. My attempts to express and understand my experience of the world, relating to issues from personal loss to climate change, is facilitated through these cultural documents. By altering them the viewer is presented with familiar, yet unreadable, information leading them to make their own associations and take their own journeys.