ARTS Perched on shelves and tabletops around her studio, Su Blackwell’s sculptures illustrate a Gothic gift for storytelling. Fairytale landscapes emerge from the leaves of open books; forest scenes are peopled with paper princesses; Alice disappears through her looking glass; cut-out birds and moths roost and flutter above the printed pages.
Blackwell has been making “cut work”, using secondhand books, for six years. For her, books are both found objects of great beauty and sources of ideas and associations to be dissected and rearranged, metaphorically and literally. She uses a scalpel to outline the elements of her ensembles, then stands them upright to create three-dimensional compositions. The resulting fragile fabrications, encased in glazed boxes, have the appearance of toy theatres.
