By Eden Chambers, First Year, Film and French
The 2025 RWA Biennial Open strips back to one of the simplest, and likely underappreciated, materials by celebrating paper in the ‘Paper Works’ exhibition. The display’s quantity and quality are instantly evident when you enter the room, with two large rooms’ walls filled with framed art, as well as pieces placed on tables and the floor around the space. The incredible depths that the paper could achieve shocked me at every piece, from sculpture, to print, to drawing, and here’s a taste to whet your appetite to go see the wonder for yourself.
This extremely detailed work by Emma Holden uses pinpricks on the back of the paper to allow the bumps to protrude like brail. As I continued throughout the exhibition, there were audible gasps of admiration for the delicate and meticulously placed dots to form a nature-inspired drawing. This piece particularly stood out to me as it didn’t rely on any other materials aside from the original paper itself to create something modestly ornate.
From big wall-filling depictions of nature to small, endearing portraits of birds, the illustrations’ variety speaks to every interest. Despite potentially being one of the more conventional uses of paper, the artists’ clever use of hidden intricacies through collage, as in Amber Rollinson’s ‘Pigeon’, or multi-media processes that led to the final product help to portray the unique character of each piece. Although a simpler concept, Rollinson captures the aloof, silliness of the pigeon with accuracy in her piece. Overall, these are not the kind of deceptive paintings that lose their magic the closer you get but instead reveal individual strokes or envelop you more into the scene.
The graphite drawings demonstrated technically outstanding skill, where the blending or graduation between shades was invisible. Caroline Burraway’s ‘Afghan Woman, Moria Refugee Camp’ evokes a paradoxical feeling of strength and despair through her photo-realistic portrait as the woman’s gaze follows you around the exhibition. As you stare into the woman’s glossy eyes, it feels as though you could just reach out and touch her wrinkled skin as you forget you’re looking at a drawing – a truly astonishing two-dimensional experience. This is contrasted by Jemma Appleby’s equally impressive, geometric scene in ‘#1130224’ and ‘#1080224’. Not only does it boast an incredibly blended shading spectrum but the sharpness of the edges of the shadows, again, tricks the mind into believing it’s 3D.
The sculptures ranged from carefully folded origami shapes to delicately cut-out elements intricately constructed to form work such as ‘In Time’. Kate Hipkiss explores the environment and climate change through her greenhouse-shaped buildings, each with its own narrative, whether that be the words on it or the different routes that make up its structure.
Even in the smallest sculptures, the perfected characters shine through. In Nadine Wickenden’s work, there’s an endearing quality of the woman in her Venetian marbled paper dress and her bright blue dog bowl. However, her sunken eyes and lack of smile sent a pang of pity for this little woman through me, and excited my imagination – why is she upset? Is her dog dead? Or perhaps she’s just been caught off guard… her subjectivity is endless. In typical Mhairi Corr fashion, ‘Alasdair’ also prompts questions of personality through his comical figure, looking equally vacant and worried. His body is made of wire wrapped in pulped paper, a relatively light and vulnerable material, in contrast to its stoney appearance, again showing the versatility of paper.
It would be unfair to talk about the sculpture displayed here without acknowledging Leah Hislop’s ‘I Will Catch You If You Fall’. A beautiful tribute to the mother/child relationship, Hislop uses thousands of folded book pages to construct an injured bird in this multidimensional work. I found the experience of viewing this piece all the more interesting as each angle of the bird presented a different aspect of its artistic beauty, be that the uniformity of the folded pages, or the protective position the bird has been found in. An impressive close to the sculptural section.
There are hundreds of other pieces to see as a part of this biennial, such as this textiles piece by Sally Baldwin, and is worth a visit, not only because it’s incredible but also because it’s free for students and lives right under our noses in the Triangle. If you have an hour to spare to be awe-struck by even the most mundane of materials, then definitely head over to the RWA.
All images courtesy of Eden Chambers
