Supercyclers! - Paper
Today's guest blog sees Sarah and Liane bring us more amazing Supercycling, this time with a mix of ornamental and structural ways to re-purpose paper. Can't wait to drag the Encyclopedia Britannica out of the garage! - Jenny x
Sydney University academics in a suburban back garden, wearing (left) Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, London: Heinemann, 1962 and Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996; and (right) The Sensational Spiderman, November # 33, New York: Marvel Comics: 2001. © The artist
This is from Simryn Gill’s Pearls series. The artist takes a favourite book from a special person and rolls it into beads for them. What a wonderful and meaningful way to treasure your old books. This beautiful image is titled Pearls, Sydney, 2003
You can read more about the necklaces in the Pearls book here
Top: Architecture Library with a front desk built from recycled books. Bottom left: Recycled paper bowls by Cuiora. Bottom right: Shredded paper bowls by Tamara Burlando.
The architecture library at Delft University of Technology features a spectacular front desk built out of recycled books. Image © Ellen Forsyth. More info here and here
These recycled paper bowls by Cuiora are made from paper bags that originally carried rice in Japan.
This basket made from shredded paper by Tamara Burlando was recently shown at The PaperMill Gallery. Burlando is South American by birth but trained in the Central Australian desert with the incredible weavers there. She weaves newspaper into her baskets, dating them and making them undeniably current.
Top: 26kgs of wastepaper turned into a desk by Studio Jens Praet. Bottom left: Shredded chair by Charles Kaisin. Bottle right: Newspaper Yarn
If you need a shredded desk to put your shredded basket on, Studio Jens Praet has made the desk for you. The design studio were horrified by the huge amounts of wastepaper produced in offices and endeavored to find another use for it. They shredded and transformed unuseful documents and leftover magazines into valuable and useful objects. The waste paper waste returns as functional furniture, that is as strong as the wood it once came from. This table is made from 26kg of leftover magazines, and is the biggest item from the Shredded Collection ever made!
If you’d like a chair to go with your table, this shredded paper chair is by Charles Kaisin.
If you’d like to do something with all your wastepaper, get your old newspapers and spin them into some paper yarn. Learn how to here.
Of course, you could wear Movana Chen’s chic outfit here is made from shredded newspapers, and was shown in the ‘Fashion Ethics Good Wear’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern art in Korea.
Clockwise from top: images 1 & 2 Paris office of Mathieu Lehanneur made from pulped paper. Images 3 & 4 Pulp 2.0 vessels and furniture
You’ll need somewhere to put all your supercycled paper goodness. This office in Paris by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur for advertising agency JWT features caves made from pulped paper and plants that play music. “It has literally sucked up and recycled the available paper in the agency, an archaic and useless support that JWT France eventually envisages totally eliminating.’
More pulped goodness from Pulp 2.0. Their post consumer vessels and furniture are made from paper waste using discarded vessels as positive image moulds. The collection is the result of a thorough research on new applications for paper waste by adding water resistant properties. A mixture of shredded newspaper, glue and water is applied in several layers on the surface, dried, and finally cut into two removing it from the mould. The pieces are glued back together before applying the last layers of the PULP mixture.
Artist Yuken Teruya makes incredible things from waste paper, including these sculptural landscapes called Corner Forest from paper rolls.
