Restore (Orange) Collage

I spotted on instagram that an artist was throwing away her offcuts; offcuts of rather posh, beautiful paper (Waterford Saunders from St. Cuthberts Mill). So I asked if she would mind sending them to me. A huge bundle arrived in the post which unravelled to fill my, admittedly small, studio floor. There were lots of awkward leftover concave shapes. I decided to restore them to A4-sized panels and from there I could continue with my process as usual. After constructing the first few of these panels, however, I realised that it was the cuts, or seams, that were of interest and that any further embellishment would actually conceal them. Over two months, I worked my way through that whole pile of paper until my bin contained only shavings and I had a neat pile of 52 panels on my desk. I tried to think like a machine, like I was churning out OSB panels. Each piece was positioned, not for its aesthetic merit but for efficiency, to avoid as little cutoff as possible. Colours, wholely the choice of the original artist, were reunited. I would start a panel, on the left, with a larger piece but then offcuts would naturally get smaller and smaller as the panel grew to the right. Some panels became more of a jumble as my stockpile dwindled down to the last few fragments. This project took my work in quite a different direction. Oddly, I don't feel like I had much choice in the matter. That pile of paper compelled me to rebuild it. It was always going to happen, it was just a matter of how quickly I cottoned on.