Rogan Brown has stated that when people look at
his work, he wants them to “see time.” His paper
sculptures do more than just that. Rogan Brown cuts
layers upon layers of large, intricately cut patterns
and forms them into slithering organic abstractions.
Drafted then cut, usually all by hand, Brown’s work
is incredibly articulate, taking months to complete a
piece. A self-taught artist, Brown has won numerous
awards from institutions like the Royal College of
Art, the DegreeArt HQ, and Artslant.
http://roganbrown.com/home.html
By Danielle McCloskey
Contributor
DM: Deriving heavily from nature and natural
elements, you take fleeting, earthy moments and microscopically small subjects and create large, emotive
abstract sculptures that freeze these small fragments in
time. How did you come to focus your work on nature?
RB: The starting point was the experience
of moving ten years ago from London to the
Cevennes mountains in southern France. It
would be difficult to imagine two more contrasting places. I suddenly found myself in the
heart of a national park surrounded by forest in
a remote, isolated area where you are obliged
to continually cut back the vegetation around
your house and maintain a clearing because of
the very real danger of forest fire. It allowed
me to connect with an old, ancestral vision of
nature, beyond the sentimental or Romantic,
nature as an immensely powerful and threatening force. I found engaging aesthetically with
this wild, rugged landscape very difficult at first.
I was unsure where to start. The sheer scale of
everything was too great, and, like a camera lens
going in and out, moving from micro to macro,
I couldn’t find a focal point. But on my hikes
through the forest I would pick up fragments,
rocks, leaves, moss, seed pods, flowers, etc., and
bring them back to draw in detail, and as I did
so I noticed the correlations between them,
the repeated patterns, motifs, and fractals, and
these became the building blocks of an aesthetic vocabulary that I would later articulate
through my work.
DM: Let’s talk materials: you like using paper
because it is strong, delicate, and neutral. Do you like
using one type of paper, specifically? Do you cut each
layer from single sheets of paper? What is your biggest
piece to date?
RB: I chose paper as a material because it is so
humble and accessible, a common thing that we
never think of, and yet it was once a tree growing in a forest. It’s such a profound, alchemical
transformation, the rough strength of the tree
becoming the smooth delicacy of paper. I liked
the poetic irony of transforming the paper once
again through cutting and in some way returning it to nature. I use one type of paper almost
exclusively, Canson 180gsm drawing paper,
because it is thick enough to be opaque, which
is important in creating the illusion of one
sheet floating on top of another, as the opacity hides the foamboard spacer separating each
layer. It is, however, thin enough to cut with a
scalpel knife relatively easily and tough enough
to be pushed to quite exacting material limits.
Each layer of the sculpture is cut from a single
sheet. Kernel is the largest handcut piece at 53
inches wide, followed by Cut Microbe, measuring 44 inches in length. The latter was commissioned to be part of a permanent exhibition in
the UK focusing on the Human Microbiome. I