Mary Button Durell‘s paper sculptures are an exercise in
limitation. She only uses tracing paper and wheat paste to
create her surreal and organic paper works which are bourne out
of a desire to challenge herself – pushing the materials until
their properties are fully explored. This search through
materiality has led her to create work that is both fragile and
strong, opaque and translucent, heavy and light. As she says in
a statement on her website: This body of work uses only tracing
paper and wheat paste as material. At first glance these pieces
appear to be built onto a rigid wire frame, however, the process
is much more organic and the structure is created from my own
hand building. Individual cells or cones that comprise most of
the pieces are first formed over molds of various shapes and
sizes and then joined together using wheat paste cell by cell.
Additional layers of paper and paste are then added for strength
and reinforcement which creates the net-like structure around
the individual cells.The tr