At Eastside Culture Crawl, intricate paper cutting becomes beautiful multilayered art
Artists like Rachael Ashe and Tara Lee Bennett make magic with paper and scissors
Tara Lee Bennett turns a colourful bouquet into sleek black and white.
Rachael Ashe’s meticulously handcut work integrates intricate repeating patterns.
The Eastside Culture Crawl runs on November 16 and 17 from 5 to 10 pm, and on November 18 and 19 from 11 am to 6 pm
PAPER CUTTING IS AN art form of such intricacy, it requires a deep-enough understanding of the material to deconstruct it—as well as patience, creativity, and a steady hand.
Those qualities are in rich supply at this year’s Eastside Culture Crawl, with each artist expressing their own take on the craft, using different papers and colours to construct a unique look.
Stir caught up with two talented paper-cutting artists part of this year’s crawl, Rachael Ashe and Tara Lee Bennett. They explained the behind-the-scenes of their creative processes in this attention-to-detail craft.
RACHAEL ASHE
Parker Street Studios
1000 Parker Street
Rachael Ashe is an interdisciplinary artist whose skill set has translated into hand-cut art. Her delicate designs started in 2012, with the self-taught paper artist returning to the Crawl for the first time since 2021.
Ashe’s innovative designs incorporate different intricate patterns and bold choices of coloured paper. “I'm showing a mix of work this year,” the artist tells Stir, “so some of my pattern-mixing paper-cut pieces and then a newer body of work that I've been doing the past year and a half, exploring pattern mixing and collage pieces. So lots of colour, lots of pattern, lots of interesting things to look at.”
Ashe’s background in other art forms, such as photography, has played a key role in her paper art. Her creations are inspired by her versatility in the arts and what she sees in the world, including the material she works with. Inspired in part by textile design, her freehand cut-out patterns often juxtapose repeating organic forms from nature—think flower petals and leaves—with geometric shapes.
“I get very inspired by the paper itself, like how you can transform it in different ways, how you can sculpt it, and specifically the body of work,” she says. “With the two bodies of work that I do now, the collage and the paper-cutting, I'm just really inspired by patterns, how you can mix them in different ways.”
Her start in the craft came differently than for most: Ashe found herself at a crossroads in her career, which sparked her interest to take up paper-cutting.
“In 2007 as a film photographer, around the time I switched to digital, I just felt this lack of hands-on creation because everything I was doing was on the computer all of a sudden,” she says. “That's where I started exploring paper in different ways—doing collage, doing altered books. And then I've been doing paper cutting as of a few years after that.”
As a Vancouverite for the past two decades, Ashe has immersed herself fully in the local art scene, seeing the paper-cutting scene expand into the Crawl. “I feel like there are way more artists that are working with paper and doing interesting things in Vancouver than there used to be, which is great,” she observes.
TARA LEE BENNETT
Parker Street Studios
Picture a garden in full spring bloom, but in a striking monochromatic paper display: Tara Lee Bennett’s paper art makes audiences reimagine floral arrangements. She creates intricate flower patterns with just a pair of scissors and paper.
“My work is very much about, and inspired by, feelings of lushness and beauty and abundance,” she says. “You just want more and more beauty. I get inspired by the overwhelmingness of beauty.”
Lee Bennett’s multilayered explosions of fern leaves, rosebuds, and stylized poppies and black-eyed Susans usually include her signature touch—a simple black, white, or black-and-white paper palette.
“A big part of choosing to take the colour out or just work with black or white pieces is because it's about seeing the intricacy and the delicacy and all of the shadows and details of my work,” Lee Bennett says. “I think it's just really beautiful: we see the colour without seeing the colour.”
Each part of her craft is strategically chosen. From the paper colour to the type of paper, Lee Bennett selects everything for a specific reason.
“My wife is a printmaker so I started out by using her leftover paper and realized it was perfect,” the artist explains. “It's archival. It's acid-free. It holds the shapes perfectly. It's not too thin. It's not too thick. It's just like Goldilocks. It's just right.”
As a well-experienced paper-artist, Lee Bennett has an understanding of how time consuming the cutting process can be, not to mention how patient someone must be to do it.
“It's just a lot of cutting and pasting and scoring, so it's just a lot of repetitive action and just trying to make as many tiny little bits and pieces as I can,” Lee Bennett says, “and then building up pace through layers and layers and layers.”
Lee Bennett is looking forward to returning to the Crawl after a few years, and enjoying the chance to see other artists and to show what she's been working on recently: “I'm feeling excited, it's going to be really fun getting to see so many people and not just be in a studio by myself.”
HERE ARE A FEW MORE artists manoeuvring paper or using it as inspiration, all worth searching out at this year’s Eastside Culture Crawl:
AIMEE HENNY BROWN
Arts Factory
281 Industrial Avenue.
Brown’s blend of archival imagery and photo-based media creates spectacular collage art. Inspired by the past and current day, her meticulous pieces often draw nostalgically from bygone eras, mixing imagery of architecture and furnishings into her own distinct worlds.
CAMILA PABON
New Foundry Artists Studio
1844 Clark Drive
The three-dimensional paper creations of Pabon come to life with bright colours. Incorporating the practices of origami and basketry, Pabon’s avant-garde pieces often have eye-grabbing tropical hues.
CRISSY ARSENEAU
Parker Street Studios
1000 Parker Street
Arseneau’s work combines soft watercolours and delicate paper-cutting with hard-edge abstract forms like folding colour bands and angular shapes.
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