Guns to Roses

Close up of bright blue room with multi-coloured paper artworks. They are made like paper lanterns, taking the shape of fans despite being made from the shapes of guns

The bright, happy colours of the fanned paper sculptures in Li Hongbo’s work Gun No. 1 (2016) would not be out of place at a seven-year-old’s birthday party. But appearances are deceiving. The underlying structures of these ephemeral decorations are solid paper cutouts in the shape of bullets, hand-held pistols, and shoulder-mounted semi-automatic weapons. The rainbow […]

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Cut and Paste

Ernest McIlveen (1898-1963) might have been around nine years of age when he demonstrated his prowess with scissors in his standard issue drawing book. Using coloured paper, Ernest diligently made thirteen kaleidoscopic designs, recording six of them in hand drawn graphs in the top left corner with pencil and ruler. He may have made them […]

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