Interview to the artist by Rachelle Gryn Brettler, from our Anniversary Book
When I read that apparently the average person in the West can recognise more than a thousand brands but less than ten wild plants, it started me thinking about making plants out of branded material. Initially I had a list of about four hundred brands that I was looking for. I did not want to buy anything - I wanted either for it to be given to me, or to find it. I use rubbish, it may not be an aesthetic material. I am keen to say that I am not making any kind of value judgement.
I am interested in the tension between the natural beauty of things that are quiet and overlooked such as weeds, clashing with the multimillion advertising budget branded material. I often make boxes out of vintage maps, sheet music and old food packaging. Often that is beautiful paper. I only use paper and card - an awful lot of packaging now is plastic, which I cannot work with. It does not suit my cutting, it does not suit my glue, the way I construct things. I have loved paper the whole of my career.
In the 90s I went on a research trip funded by the Stationers Company to South Korea, where I looked at paper making and the use of paper in Korean culture. When I returned, I stopped thinking about paper just as a surface to work on, but as the actual material that I could make art out of.
I base my work on real things - I never ever use someone else's image of a plant; I always go out, collect the plant, press it.... I have learnt how to make herbarium sheets, with specific ways of arranging them and with rules on the size they have to be, then I use that as my template. It has to be life size - the plants, butterflies, leaves - I do not like them to be just decorative, that authenticity is very important to me.
There are other parameters - definitely in terms of the butterfly boxes that I create: none of the names of the butterflies are made up, they are all real species. For example, one which is cut from the security lining of a blue envelope - this will be a Common Blue or a Large Blue, or if cut from a map of woodland it might be called Speckled Wood. There will be a link between the name of the butterfly and the material that I am using. I know that not everybody has all of these rules, but my work is very much embedded in research and I have to have a reason for everything, however tenuous for me to use it. Actually, it is silly because I am the one making these rules.
I suppose an idea builds its own momentum. It is like riffing, if you are a musician, you have your tune, your theme, and as you are going along, things just happen...
I would be lost without my scissors. Mine are Italian, made by Tenartis, who also make scissors for barbers. They are for collage, and they are covered in black Teflon, so the glue does not stick to them. I like that they are black and I like that they are really sharp. People who do papercutting divide up into people who like using knives, people who like using scissors. I use a pair of tweezers to pick things up that are too small to pick up with fingers, apply it, then I rub it down using my bookbinding techniques and for that I use something called a bone folder - very often mine are made from horn or wood. That is it: scissors, tweezers and bone folder.
After the war there were lots of the boats left from Dunkirk, particularly around Teddington and we lived on a little ship until I was eight or nine. I was an only child and I spent a lot of time up in the wheel house making villages out of boxes - which is pretty much what I do now.