Su Blackwell

Su Blackwell, The Snow Queen series, book-cut sculpture, 27 x 32 x 23 cm, 2005

Travail inspirant et léger comme un rêve.
Work inspiring and light like a dream.

"Su Blackwell's work is handmade. There is something of a delicate beauty at work here. It is evocative of dream-time and puts into visual form some very transient ideas. An empty child's dress transforms into hundreds of butterflies. The work is fragile, precious. There is a desire to utilise non-art materials; she uses what is at hand. There is an obsessive, repetitive action at work, transforming the everyday into the fantastical. She transforms old books into three-dimensional theatres, and her reconstruction offers up to the viewer many questions. We can no longer physically read the book, so in that way it is made redundant; and yet on another level it has taken on a new life and is telling a different story. Her work gives a new dimension to the rich European tradition of storytelling: in the early 1880s Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published Grimm's Fairy Tales, a collection of folk stories, and Hans Anderson wrote 135 Fairy Tales between 1835 and his death in 1875. In many of these so-called 'Fairy Stories' there is a darker side, far removed from the Wonderful World of Disney." Steffan Jones-Hughes 2006

http://www.sublackwell.co.uk