THE RECYLED PAPER

Inspirantion

I have scar-prone skin. Growing up, I often felt insecure about the scars left on my body. They seemed like marks I wasnt allowed to carry, the constant reminders of imperfections. They also represent how society treats bodies that do not fit into narrow ideals of beauty or perfection. When making this piece, I realized that paper resembles myself and this social issue in many ways. It is thin, easily torn and always bearing traces of what has happened to it.

In this work, I first collected the garbage garments from the road, the rotted leaves, and the abandoned branches from the park and then crushed them in a blender to make the particles as tiny as possible. I added pvc glue, water, and dried them and in doing so, the papers were successfully made. By stitching two or three sheets together with red thread and hardening them with AB glue, I deliberately left the traces visible. These stitched scars resist erasure and stand up as signs of resilience.

The final outcome is shown as light transmitted and organic. Light passing through the semi-translucent paper highlights its fibrous texture and projects shadows onto the surrounding space.

Then I drilled each sheet of paper and stacked them together by placing the steel rods in between.
In order to keep the rods straight I had to measure the height in between and tried many times.

After stacking all of the paper together, the overall structure of this model is like a circle with a huge crack in the middle, which represents the scars.

YVONNE CHEN

WELCOME TO MY MATERIALS LAB

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YVONNE
CHEN