Sai Wai Foo – “At the Edge of the Map” – mixed media – 35 x 40 x 50cm (13.8″x15.7”x19.7″) Sai Wai Foo

Pleated book papers, glue, ceramic doll head, aluminum, enamel paint, large vintage glass headed pins, glass head pins, cotton rag, balsa wood, bamboo, linen thread, cotton thread, silver plated vessel. Free standing. Housed in a glass dome with painted wooden base.

35 x 40 x 50 cm (13.8″ x 15.7” x 19.7″)

Sai-Wai Foo (Melbourne, Australia) is an emerging artist, who began to develop her art practice 2012, her fashion design background influences and informs her current art practice; finish, construction, materials, themes and approach. Her practice primarily focuses on the manipulation and folding of cut paper, to produce volume and structure from a traditionally two-dimensional medium. Sculptural works combine these organic paper growths with other pieces of collected ephemera to create vignettes and still points in time.
In a contemporary world of mass production, the reworking yellowing pages into sculptural forms is a foil to those mechanical processes. The fragility of brittle aging paper gleaned from discarded books, manuscripts that bear marks of previous lives. The act of cutting, folding and manipulating paper beyond the flat plane, is implicit in its human connection and continues this discussion, pushing the work into the three-dimensional realms.This narrative weaves, through these crafted elements to honoring the discarded, objects rich with the patina of age, once treasured but now castoff. My practice seeks to repurpose redundant items, in turn questioning how items are used and re-used. How the unwanted can be turned it into an object that will be once again treasured, seeking to re-appropriate the rejected and imbue it with a new value once again precious and prized.