Paper Cut Expo @ The Graphic Design Festival Breda 2010 (Event Coverage by Marshall Alexander)

What caught my eye about the Paper Cut Expo was the way the paper craft were displayed, on what looked like escaped reams of paper! Courtesy of "Guest Blogger" and paper-craft designer / paper engineer; Marshall Alexander, we get to see display-images of the expo, held during the Graphic Design Festival Breda [www] in the Netherlands, along with Marshall's description and thoughts about the event.

CLICK THRU to view+read, including details about the papertoy Marshall designed specifically for a customizing contest, for the event.

Curated by publisher Gestalten and the editors of Papercraft, the show will run until the 20th of June at KOP. The Graphic Design Festival Breda will run until the 30th of May.

Participants include : Julien Vallée (CAN), Peter Lundgren (SWE), Postlerferguson (GB), Kenn Munk (GB), Elisabeth Lecourt (FR), Hina Aoyama (JAP), Brian Dettmer (US), Susy Oliveira (CAN), Marshall Alexander, Nanibird (US), Matt Hawkins (US), Shin Tanaka (JAP), LouLou & Tummie, Hattie Newman (GB).



MARSHALL: First of all I was very honored to be asked to submit material for the show, being in the company of some of the papertoy designers I really admire. The people at the gallery did a great job presenting all our pieces in a very unusual setting. They managed to get hold of two truckloads of paper that was about to send to China to be recycled. Using this material they created the perfect environment for our toys to hang around.


MARSHALL: Instead of grouping the toys per artist or style, they mixed them all together on these flowing wavelike shapes of paper. This setting gave the impression that all these toys where having their own party as well.

Some toys were hiding between the sheets of paper, some toys from one designer seemed to have started a conversation with toys from another designer, and some toys were defying the laws of gravity.



MARSHALL: Next to our papertoys there was also some other beautiful paper art on display, and an animation program showing paper created/related films. Some pretty awesome stuff as well. Even the seats you could sit on were made of giant strips of paper.



MARSHALL: I was there at the opening night and it was great to see people having such a good time seeing all these toys together. I also created a blank template for a customizing contest and a lot of people took the print with them, so hopefully we managed to get a bunch of new papertoy fans/designers as well.


TOYSREVIL: Could you tell us a bit more about the paper-toy template? And how to get at them?

MARSHALL: I created the template especially for the show and is a fairly simple model so it's easy to construct and customize. I didn't want to scare people away with a complex shape that no one dares to build :)

The plan is that the template also will be available at the website of the gallery (http://www.stichtingkop.nl), so you can download it as well if you want to customize it. But when they make it available online is kind of out of my hands.


[49 x images in slideshow above / CLICK for full-screen viewing]

[Papercraft by Kenn Munk]
Credit: All event images by Marshall Alexander via Flickr
Additional event info via Gestalten