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English artist Julie Dodd usually works with paper creating books, installations, sculptural pieces and even recycling it to make new paper. Inspired by the patterns and shapes found in nature, Dodd tends to work in multiples mimicking life in its growth and regeneration.

What first drew me to Dodd’s work were her Paper Eggs where she used recycled magazine pages glued in layers to revert them into a wood-like material. It’s very hard to believe that those eggs are made from paper! Julie Dodd’s choice of eggs was done as a commentary on the decline of migrating birds to Europe due to loss of habitat and climate change all stemming back to the loss of trees. The fleeting nature of magazines converted into a permanent and significant object.

Also shown above are Dodd’s Forest: Lungs of the World  and Illegal Logging installations, but there is plenty more to see on her website including beautiful paper cut books and her Human Nature installation.

via saatchi online

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Japanese artist Yuken Teruya, now based in NYC, creates beautiful paper cut-out trees from bags, bills, and even toilet paper rolls. In his paper bag sculpture series, Notice – Forest, the trees are cut from the top of the bag and folded down to be viewed within the bag, giving the illusion that the bag is holding the fragile tree, when in actuality it is the tree that is holding up the bag.

Green Economy, a series where the trees were cut out and folded up from international paper bills, was a project done to illustrate a New York Times Magazine article. And Corner Forest is his series from toilet paper rolls, where the delicate branches cut from the cardboard tubes extend out to create a lovely forest. In a sense, it’s as though the trees are allowed to come full circle, from tree to paper to paper tree.

Currently, some of Teruya’s work can be seen as part of a group show at 601Artspace through the end of April, here in New York.

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There have been many of these thread/string art installations recently, but this one, Connect/Dissect by Maltese-born, UK-based artist Patrick Mifsud seems to integrate the whole gallery especially well. I like the way it wraps around corners in addition to the tension and different textures that are created by varying the distance between the threads.

Photos by Philip Sayer courtesy of Marsden Woo Gallery