Manchester First Cut exhibition

The First Cut exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery features a range of paper-based art.  With this style of work it's usually the technically intricate stuff which grabs me, and that was certainly the case here.  Overall, there wasn't much to inspire -- or so it first appeared...

I had intended to post a very brief summary with photos.  However, when I started to sort through the images I found myself drawn into the work more deeply, and started to look at the artists' websites for more background.  What I found added a lot more depth, and I've ended up deciding to post pretty much everything I photographed.

Definitely shows the importance of reflective practice!

This stunning piece is by Chris Andrew Jones who produces decayed-looking images using magazines and varnish.  I found images of a similar bike (prototype?) and a jaw-dropping horse-and-cart on his website.

Next up we have a couple of exhibits which caught my eye: a flower bed made of small pop-up gardening books, a forest of paper leaves, and a smoke-like column.

Yuken Tetuya's miniature, detailed tree is cut from a Burger King paper bag.  It's part of a series where he takes a bag produced by a large multinational and cuts a tree into it, one indigenous to the country in which the company is based.  The effect is of fantastic fragility, which comes across better in a professional photo of this same work.  His website shows other projects, including a very imaginative toilet roll installation.

This next one by Su Blackwell is a bit boring but I've included it to allow me to link to some of her other work, which is stunning.  My particular favourites are Edensor, Hope and Jorinde & Jorindel.

Noriko Ambe's A Piece of Flat Globe Vol. 8 is an example of how real life overtakes art.  Since 1999 she has obviously spent a lot of time making this type of erosion sculpture -- her website confirms "I individually cut single sheets of paper by free-hand and stack them together" to "embody relationships among humans, time and nature."

Yet paper-erosion 3D printers use this same technique to create 3D models.  Perhaps the tedious, labourious construction is part of her message?  If not, she's thrown away a lot of time she'll never get back!

Unfortunately I couldn't get a close-up of this next exhibit, so it's badly out-of-focus in my photo.  You'll find better images of The Judge and Inheritance online, although they lack the three-dimensionality of the real thing.

These weapons, plus Money Map of the World, are by Justine Smith, who specialises in the concept of money as a conduit of power.

I loved this this large-matchbox-sized explosion of type & camera-related images.  Being utterly useless at German, I had to look up 'fotoecken' and found it to be the small corners used to mount photos.

It reminded me of Futurist stuff, so I popped onto Google to look up Futurism to add a text link; by luck I'd forgotten to delete the previous search text and ended up looking at 'fotoecken futurist' -- the first result of which was the personal blog of exhibit artist Sarah Bridgland!  Maybe there just aren't enough people creating dynamic art with photo-corners.

These final two images are typical of much of the work on display: lots of sliced book pages, and faar too many silhouettes.  Once you've seen too many examples of the same idea, it's easy to start skimming over things -- so I picked these to remind me that each piece has been created for a reason, and that it would get a lot more attention if it were in contrast or isolation.

More Manchester art in the next post!