Folded Form
Pauline Loctin's folded paper installation (image: Mark Cocksedge).
“The folding I use looks kind of like a butterfly. Or maybe a bird.”
Suspended in a swirling flock above the atrium of Uncommon Holborn, paper artist Pauline Loctin’s Flying in Nuanced Colours is a difficult installation to pin down concretely. Her folded forms, executed in sheets of hot pink and chartreuse paper, do resemble a flight of butterflies, startled up from the forest floor. Or maybe birds of paradise, dancing in the air. Or how about neat bowties of farfalle pasta, tumbling into the pot? Or a swirl of taffeta skirts, kicked up in a dance?
“I like that it’s abstract,” explains Loctin, who founder her studio in Montreal, Canada, after an earlier career in music. “You can't really say what my work is exactly, but I think it makes you feel something. I like that it brings people joy.” Commissioned by Zoe Allen from art consultancy Artistic Statements, Flying in Nuanced Colours was designed to fill the atrium space of Uncommon, a new 105,000 sqft co-working space in central London designed by architects astudio and interior designers Quarterback.
Uncommon’s interior design makes heavy use of indoor plants, creating a tranquil biophilia that Loctin hoped her work might contrast with. “I wanted to bring some freedom to the space, because for an environment like that you need peace and quiet,” she explains, “but you also need to dream a little. So I wanted to propose something very colourful and bold. For me, colour is freedom, which is what I wanted to bring to the space.”
The paper forms that Loctin creates are achieved through careful folding, with all paper for the project donated by G . F Smith from its Colorplan range, to which hot pink and chartreuse are the newest additions. “It’s a strong paper and pretty heavy, which I need because I don’t want the shapes to bend,” Loctin explains, specifying that the paper’s 270gsm weight allows its folds to stay in place as stiff pleats. “The Colorplan never breaks,” she adds. “It’s one of the only papers I’ve found that can stay in shape.”
Central to Loctin’s installation, and her wider work, is the creation of large-scale three-dimensional forms from a small-scale sheet material. “People just think of paper as a weak material,” she says, “and I think that's why they’re amazed when they see big installations created from it. In their heads, paper can’t do that.” In Loctin’s work, however, paper can do many things and take many forms: be they butterflies, birds, pasta or ruffled skirts.
Photographs Mark Cocksedge