✹ West Dean rescidency #2
6th July 2021
The second day of the residency, today we have Corina Fletcher, the paper engineer who has been working in the business for more than 25 years. She has brought tons of books to tell us about the history of pop-up and how she become paper engineer. It is a rare, extraordinary career one can say when people ask what do one do for a living. I wouldn’t know what paper engineer is if Corina hasn’t tell us her story. Beginning with graphic design degree from CSM, she later found that she enjoyed thinking 3 dimensional rather than 2 dimensional. And then once got a freelance to work with pop-up, she really enjoy doing it and hasn’t stopped since.
Everything she has shown us, we always be wow by the work of pop-up. It’s an impressive pieces of art, the paper pop out from the book, some moving, some has hidden figure underneath. Unexpected form of art. Corina has tough us some basic form of pop-up, and then we tried making our own.
Later in the afternoon, we tried to adapt pop-up into the fan. Thinking about it - fan has similar form as books, it fold up together open and close. I tried to make some flower pop-up that can give the sense of abundance as I saw from one book Corina brought with her. This is the most impressive workshop so far, as I always fond of pop-up art for a long time, I think everyone does as pop-up is an interactive form of art that children always find it fascinating. I like that we have got to learn the skill from the real professional, it’s much better than reading how-t from the books, and have a conversation with her is such an inspiring moment.
