The sky's the limit

Five feet tall, 10 inches square - the 7th and tallest tower yet!

Berlin

Tv tower, ferris wheel at the christmas market and memorial

Hundreds of folded paper stars in a shop window display

Garden of exile at the Jewish Museum

Book burning memoral in the ground at Bebelplatz

Holocaust memorial

A last minute organised weekend trip to Berlin to see some amazing and inspiring sculpture and architecture that couldn't be more fitting with my work.

Progress

Haven't drawn in a while

Rebecca Hooper, 'Walking in Manhattan,' 2009, Pencil on paper, 11 x 28 cm

My friend has set up an online blog 'Fear of Butterflies,' to send drawings to that will then be made into zines and sold around Cheltenham. I decided to draw out the area that I covered of Manhattan by foot. I did go on lots of bus tours outside the drawing but the points marked are roughly the outline of where my feet touched the ground (if they ever really did).

One down......

Getting physical

I've never been one to do anything too strenuous, however yesterday I found the inner builder in me and made this wooden mould with an inner structure (so that it is hollow and not completely impossible to move) and filled it with concrete. I want to eventually make a cluster of concrete towers, different heights and widths. It's going to be hard work....

Mountain buildings

I've started layering cut-out sections of buildings and cityscapes to make some 3d paper reliefs, it's quite difficult to show all the different pieces in a photograph but my favourite ones are the individual buildings pointing up to the sky, they are almost more recognisable as mountains rather than buildings. The more built up reliefs however are much more literal of a city.

Skyline syndrome

When I took a ferry out to the Statue of Liberty I remember looking back at Manhattan and the towers overlooking the Hudson and not being able to help but imagine them as little rhomboids, made from card or wood, pieced into a massive grid like some kind of giant 3d jigsaw puzzle. So it was only natural that the first thing I did when I got back was to make paper cut-outs and pop-ups of the skylines and buildings I saw.

New York, New York

In June this year I was lucky enough to win a Travel Award prize from Uni to go to New York. I chose the destination as I was aware that not only were the art galleries and exhibitions going to be unmissable but just being in the city would be completely influential. There was a 'more than perfect for me' exhibition on at the time at the MOMA called 'Paper: Pressed, stained, slashed, folded,' and as paper is one of my main materials to work with I was spoilt. But then I took a train uptown to Beacon and visited without a doubt my favourite gallery in the world, the Dia:Beacon. As my work was becoming more 3d and I needed to look at other materials this place was sure to give me some inspiration, housing some of the largest sculptures you could ever imagine including Richard Serra, Donald Judd and a personal favourite artist of mine Sol LeWitt.

Pop Up

Rebecca Hooper, 2009, 'A Minimalist's Book,' Paper, 21 x 29 cm

I love that a simple horizontal cut across a fold can grow into a complicated cluster of three-dimensional shapes. This book starts off with a single cube and gradually becomes more and more filled, until there are so many they fold outside of the pages when closed. Around the time I made this I was looking at so many different ways to make a shape pop out of a page but the excitement of working in 3d took over and my cardboard boxes stole my full attention.

Square Obsession

Rebecca Hooper, 2009, 'Untitled,' Cardboard, 152 x 152 x 51 cm

Rebecca Hooper, 2009, 'Infinity,' Paper on Plastic, 5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 cm

Rebecca Hooper, 'Cathedral Window,' 2009, Folded Paper, 96 x 128 cm

As I continued on into my second year of Uni, I relied more and more on underlying patterns, whether it was a number sequence or all the white squares in a crossword puzzle, for the structure of my work and found inspiration in anything from a cardboard box to quilting patterns.

Thank you Mary Martin

Rebecca Hooper, 2008, '1-15,' Paper and Card, 46 x 78 x 2 cm

Over two years ago I began working with permutations and numbers, systems and squares. Not much has changed since.........