TEACH & TRAIN

Slide and cut paper work: Nicole Kuhlmann, HAWK Hildesheim, 
Gestaltung/Grafikdesign.

Lovely example for a plain and simple cover slide that takes the audience by the hand and marches off, story telling: This is where we’ll go. No glamorous iStockphoto stuff. The digital divide has been crossed once again. Analog. Digital. Human. Good mix.

Paper cuts can be more than those cute Christmas figurines your mum made for you, or the cheap silhouettes you can still buy for a penny and a farthing at the fair, she says, and is oh so right, and it does not really matter which currency is yours.

I still remember those petrifying black on white session from years ago, and how my sister and I had to sit quite still, and how we were forced to smile, and how the smile never showed on black on white, and how I have hated paper cuts ever since as something dead and stiff. Until today.

And she brings samples, and they are handmade, unperfected, fuzzy at the edges, alive and kicking. I was getting impatient, she says. I could never sit still long enough for one of those fine, deep, bleeding cuts, she says. And I know exactly what she means, for words are just like that: They are always escaping that last smooth, perfect touch of the blade.

She brings hand outs, hand made, all different, yet all the same; one for each of us. I could cut only two in one go with a surgical scalpel, she says. And she makes her art come alive and vibrant, and she makes us hungry for more. And that is pretty much what I ask from a good talk at the end of a term.

Make. Me. Want. More.

And to make sure she does not stumble, she creates  an overview of her slides for herself, the last, best visual hope for a script I know: One image, one sentence, one story.

Thank you for a lovely talk!

Related links:

http://www.anastassia-elias.com

http://www.boveylee.com

The underlying themes in my cut paper works are power, sacrifice and survival.

Hina Aoyma Watch paper cut letters dance.

Karen Bit Vejle Norwegian paper cut tapestry, large scale.

“My heart and soul are at peace when I have the scissors in hand and the paper dances between the blades. If my scissors can manage to make you stop and wonder for just one instant, I will be happy.”