“the range of emotions and stories
that can be conveyed is limitless,
and i’ve barely just started.”- warren king, cardboard artist
and their nuances. “What I
find most interesting about
working with cardboard are
the limitations,” he discloses.
“With wood, clay or stone,
you can create virtually any
shape. But with the way that I
choose to work with cardboard,
the range is severely limited.
I don’t crush or mash it but,
instead, I preserve the layers and
the corrugation. And I don’t bend
it unnaturally. That means it can
be curved in only one direction,
parallel to the corrugations. With
these rules, spherical shapes are
therefore impossible. So using
cardboard to make a human face,
which is full of rounded shapes,
requires a completely different
thinking from the mindset
associated with traditional
mediums. It’s about creating
an illusion of roundness, about
breaking complex shapes down
into simpler geometries.
“But this is what I find
so compelling about the
material. These limitations
don’t inhibit my creativity;
they are the source of it. By
making it necessary to
abstract or simplify a shape,
I force myself to really
understand the components
of an expression or gesture.”678