1) Sue Blackwell gets her inspiration from old bookshops she would spend a day at the bookshop. She first discovered this technique when she took a trip to Thailand where she bought a beautiful second hand book. Soon her father passed away and she started thinking about life and death from this thoughts she made her first book sculpture “The Quiet American”. She began working with paper after that event and later on stumbled into creating sculptures of fairy tales.
2) She first begins her imaginative process by reading the book, she particularly like books with multi faced sides of the story and with illustrations if there is a particular chapter in the book she would read it multiple times so then she gets a clear image of what she wants to creates and then she starts cutting away pages of the book to recreate a work of art.
3) She starts by sketching out how she would want the scene to look like. Then starts to cut out pieces of the scenes that would be used in the sculpture, with a craft knife then treats paper to protect it from UV damage. She states “I also use illustrations from the books to incorporate colour, but I prefer working with monochromatic white paper and printed text.”
4) My favourite sculpture by Su Blackwell would be the scene where she from sleeping beauty where sleeping beauty meets the bad fairy with the spindle. In this sculpture I see the bad fairy sitting on a stool spinning something on a spindle and sleeping beauty approaching to touch the spindle. She has used an even amount of white paper and paper from the book.
5) Personally I think Su Blackwell’s work is very creative with the way she creates an amazing piece of art from old fairy tales. I admire her work her work as lead me into creating a scene from Cinderella possibly the scene where Cinderella meats her fairy god mother.
Profile:
Su Blackwell grew up and was born in Sheffield in 1975 making her 39 this year. Her mother was a nurse and her father was a gas...