AZURE 2015-03-04

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Day 4 Day 5
Day 7
Paper chase
One creative’s daily search for inspiration, through a tiny utopia
charles young is making his city, one day at a
time. every 24 hours, the edinburgh designer
completes another building in a rapidly expanding
municipality called paperholm. However, this is
no mega-development of concrete and steel, but
rather a miniature world wrought in watercolour
paper, built on a foundation of wooden blocks and
the occasional small stone.
since he began his project this past august,
young has posted the results online (often in the
form of animated giFs) as regularly as the sun
rises. among the dozens of completed constructions,
the city is now equipped with a watchtower,
an aircraft hanger, a water wheel, a radar station,
an oil derrick and an observatory.
First-time visitors to the paperholm realm will be
amazed by the intricacy of young’s craft and his
relentless pace, but those who linger will see that
the greatest labour involves his imagination. His
diurnal challenge is more than an exercise in repetition:
he is not just reinventing the wheel every
day, but devising something entirely new.
each iteration of the materials – manipulated
using little more than a pair of hands and a sharp
blade – is both the same as and uniquely different
from all of the models that came before.
young’s enterprise demonstrates the fundamental
divide within the artist’s task: to make the
same different; to take what we know and make
it new, and to do it again and again, until the limits
that were initially thought to be a prison turn out
to fuel inspiration and push the work to unimagined
places. That is what it takes to build a metropolis.
paperholm. com
Terence Dick is a Toronto art critic. He also edits
a visual arts magazine at akimbo.ca and teaches
philosophy to high school students.
pHoTograpHy by cHarles young
98 mar ⁄ apr 2015 azuremagazine.com