Cardboard was one of the few things you could not eat on the Ekotown festival in the Amsterdam forest park. We made birds and elephants with the audience! It’s always nice to see adults and children working together. Sometimes people think we do children’s workshops (parents like to see us as a kindergarten). The idea that playing and tinkering and crafting together is childish is still strong with some people. But especially when they work together, adults and children inspire each other in the best way. Children learn from the skill, structure and endurance of the parents, parents learn to loosen up, be serviceable, explain and mainly: play.
I found out about a group exhibition named Elevated Corrugated in San Francisco at The Museum of Craft and Design when visiting cardboard artist Kiel Johnson. It features some works that I really wanted to see in real life! Click to enlarge!
I guess the curator (Marc D’estout) had some of the same problems as this website has! Making a material the starting point of an exhibition can only work if you find an interesting angle to view the material from. What I found most interesting in this exhibition is the way the artists defined their own method of sculpting with cardboard.
This cardboard camera is by Kiel Johnson. Kielis a versatileartist who,alongside his largelabyrinthine drawings, oftenworks on cardboard objects and video’s.
Michael Stutz works are superlarge! This technique of weaving cardboard makes it possible to see the sculpture from the inside and the outside. Tom Burckhardt shows some parts of a bigger installation he made named Full Stop. The details in the cardboard versions of his artistic tools give me the feeling that Tom loves his studio and work. It’s almost romantic!
Scott Fife’s work is super detailed and rough at the same time. It is robust and solid! The screws, glue and sketch lines contribute to the personality and character of those who are portrayed. The faces show a lot of subtlety, while they seem to be made with big gestures.
Ann Weber gives reused cardboard new look and feel. Leathery or fabric like with staples as a kind of sewing. After some sort of varnishing the gourd shaped objects are even more difficult to interpret. I had to think of old baseballs and leather sofas
And there were many more works! A well balanced exhibition in a nice and clean gallery space. I have to thank the KLIK! animation festival (especially Tunde Vollenbroek) for taking me and my Midnight Madness animation show on a West Coast tour! This why I was able to visit this exhibition!
They don’t often work 3D is what they told us, and the size was also a little bigger then they were used to. The group of 40 illustration students was keen on expanding their boundaries. They started sketching in groups of three and got to work in a haze of glue and cardboard. All these faces were made in less then 4 hours! We were impressed by the cooperation, detail and expression they were able to develop in the little time they had.
At the Horecava: a big dutch event for everything restaurant-food-cafe-bar related we worked with Icova the dutch marketleader in recycling. Their slogan is: “making more from waste!”. Now that’s something we can work with. On the spot we created a superlarge puppet called Bettie (the name is borrowed from Bettie Serveert, a famous dutch indie band). We made a large stand to work in with Astrid Tweepuntnul’s beautiful Alice in Wonderland puppets, a large cubic 3d recycling logo and some 3D letters out of cardboard. Bettie was our first effort in making articulate cardboard walking puppets! The whole character is rigged on an old stripped backpack with aluminum frame. We are now often using this technique: so please saves those old backpacks for us!
Team: Edo Sutherland, Michael Veerman, Veerle Cima, Astrid van der Velde and Mathijs Stegink!
Want to make more from waste?
We can help you with workshops, demonstrations and activations! YEAH TELL ME MORE!
Time for something different at our favorite festival (KLIK! Animation Festival). As you may know we are connected to the festival organizing animation workshops, creating a variation of whacky objects, events, decorations and crazy animation programs. This year we wanted to try something new, yet in the spirit of Cardboarding: working together with the audience of the festival on a big creative project! A place for the festival goers to create and experiment with their own characters and creative skills and show them off: at the Sockpuppetparty!
So we gathered a lot of material: 150 socks, fabric, needles, yarn, sequins, hot glue guns, stuffing, buttons, googly eyes and and assorted bits and pieces. We created a hand-puppet-sized boxing ring for sockpuppet armwrestling and made sure there were some good tunes afterwards (Gangpol und Mitt and Eboman).
We came to the Lowlands festival with 22 hyped out Cardboarders from the Netherlands and Russia! Four days later 60.000 Lowlanders poured in to the terrain and just took over our venue (an old bumperstage). Crafting and tinkering people were everywhere! If you like to read something about the ambience: a great piece of (dutch) writing on 3voor12. Saturday was Cardboard Robotbuilding Day! LTV (captain video) made us a video of the Robot Run. On sunday we made some cardboard boats and tried the out: live on national radio! And then there was the parties at night, screening the weirdest animations from the KLIK! animation Festival!
Images by Kate Nozik, 3voortwaalf and many of the people below
Many thanks to the best team ever: Janneke Stegink, Michael Veerman, Annemieke Dunnink, Astrid van der Velde, Lyoni Spiers, Barbara de Haan, Maxi Meister, Eva Stegink, Smurfit Kappa, Jeroen Funke, Lamelos, Boris Peeters, Sam Peeters, Koos Schaart, Arjen Pas, Marjolein van der Wal, Edo Sutherland, Albert Kannemans, Michael and Kate Nozik, Anastasia Vinograda, Josephine Beijer, Yvonne van Ulden, Jan Vriends, Sergej Korsakov… and.. and… and…
We had a cardboarders party at the Binck festival which took place in Astrid’s new workshop in the Hague! What a great evening: we build and destroyed a castle with some skilled builders! And some real explosions too! Please don’t try this at home! We found out it was quite dangerous in the end! We used ordinary deodorant as an explosive and thick cardboard tubes as barrels. We were quite surprised by the power of the shots!
Cardball is THE new sport. It’s the only sport that is played before it’s invented. Basic rules at the moment of writing:
– It’s considered cheating if you don’t cheat with Cardball. – Build a cardboard costume for two people that covers all hands and feet. – No human appendage should ever touch the Cardball! – Set an easy goal and try to score.
This game was thought up by the ultra-smart people during the super-short workshop at Freedomlab.org . They invited us to show them what cardboarding is about and to see if they could use some of our techniques in their European think tanks. Turned out we got really curious about a lot of their techniques too!
Buijs Events asked us to make a Cardboard Model Boats workshop in a beautiful old building in the Rotterdam Harbor! We didn’t stop after building the boatmodels. We made video’s of all the groups of builders (120 builders!) pictures of the boats. In the party afterwards we showed the animation we made of this with some other animated vj-goodness (which is our actual profession besides cardboarding). And ofcourse the boats we’re floating around nicely in the grid above the party. The cardboarders team for this project: Astrid van der Velde, Janneke Stegink de Graaff, Josephine Beijer, Albert Kannemans, Edo Sutherland, Koos Schaart, Jeroen Funke, Michael Veerman, Niek Das en Mathijs Stegink.
Oxfam asked us to make candytrays for their new project promoting fair chocolate. Women in chocolate supply chains face inequality, hunger and poverty. Big companies are doing little to address these problems. We tried to turn the chocolate-candy-trays in to tough and forceful fighting costumes!
Cardboarders Workshops with a.o. students Mitchel van der Jagt en Sascha Dekker at the Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam! We made this stuff in one afternoon. I think the wearable city will have a follow up in the future. It’s funny to think of the wearable cardboard skyline, still standing there, somewhere in Rotterdam. Maybe covered with a bit of snow now 🙂 A big shout out out to all the students that made this a very inspirational workshop! Loved the ambiance at that school!
A cardboard artist often sees big piles of cardboard on the side of the road, waiting to be picked up by the cities’ recycling company. I always fantasize about the things I could make out of these piles and how much fun it would be to put these things on the street again. The artists underneath recognized that cardboard, together with concrete and glass is the most contemporary material. It’s appearance is intertwined with our everyday environment, so much that we sometimes do not even see it any more.
Since his fabulous rendering of a very hip and nostalgic boombox for Mini, Bartek Elsner’s work is all over the web. His other work (for example this Raven) is more exciting and subtle. This dark, geometric piece is only visible for the careful onlooker. His cardboard fireplace touches a similar subject. Bringing the indoors to the outdoors, creating a visual warmth, crossing the line between personal and public.
Another artist from Germany: street artist EVOLmakes unbelievably detailed stencils (!) on cardboard. He transforms the mundane surfaces of old cardboard boxes to incredible life like pictures of inner city landscape.
We we’re thinking about typographical costumes lately (yeah, we think about that sort of stuff) so I did some research on wearable cardboard typography. We didn’t find much, we hope this post will make you help us and some good stuff will surface! First we have a gem: the video for Lushlife shot at more then 65 locations with an unbelievable large amount of typographical cardboard masks. Made by Lamar + Nik: very inspiring!
This picture is on amandine alessandra’s site, she did a very nice visual research on “body typography”. Luckily there’s no problem finding stuff about that! She has some great examples!
Maybe the one next to it is cheating because it’s probably not inspired by a letter: Zoltan Tombor took this picture of the Letter T for french magazine Twill 🙂
This last picture is a cool promotional picture for the bicycle film festival (couldn’t find which one)! Very funny!
So please! If you find some good cardboard typographical costumes Please give us a comment!
Klik! Animation Festival (now kaboom!) is the best animation festival in the world! Because they aim to wake the toon character living in us all! No surprise we have some tight connections with them! On saturday we started building robots with the audience for a Cardboard Robot Dance Off during the Nobody Beats The Drum concert that night. There was not a lot of dancing, it immediately ended in robot mayhem 🙂 Sigh! Can’t wait for the next Klik!
For the KLIK! Animation Festival (now Kaboom) in the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam we developed this life size animation workshop. It combines our two favorite disciplines: cardboard building and animation. This is a workshop we perfected in later iterations on bigger festivals like Lowlands, IFFR and Hemeltjelief. It works best as an ongoing workshop during festivals or, adding little animations on the spot, resulting in one big one at the end of the day. We have a continuos output, so you can immediately see what you are making and also what has been made before. It is also interesting for onlookers and people who just want to participate as prop makers!
Picnic is the first festival in the new building for the Amsterdam Filmmuseum EYE. It is the best location ever! They asked us to come and build something and when we saw these stairs we just couldn’t resist dropping something! So we built a Giant Cardboard Marble Run during the festival. With some help from the audience we created it in the two days of the festival and it made several clear runs! We we’re sponsored by Mediawijzer.net a dutch organisation that creates awareness about media. Cardboarders Crew this time were Michael Veerman, Astrid van der Velde, Albert Kannemans, Koos Schaart, Janneke Stegink, Stefanie Weijsters, Josephine Beijers and Mathijs Stegink!
The KOP festival in Deventer (the Netherlands) invited us to make big cardboard heads (KOP=head in dutch). So we did and in one day we made these! On the festival we invited visitors to help us make even more big heads, too bad there was so much rain 🙂 Afterwards we used the heads as decoration for the festival in the burgerweeshuis. If you like us to come to your festival and make beautiful stuff with you and the visitors, just give us a call! (sponsored by Smurfit Kappa Zedek, many thanks to our team: Wilma Koorn, Janneke de Graaff, Astrid van der Velde, Michael Veerman and Koos Schaart. Also thank you Rob Bisseling and the lovely people at KOP-festival)
I heard someone say the Burning Man Festival is a new World Wonder. Incredible! Something with the motto “leave no trace” is now becoming a part of a list of things that only wanted to leave their trace. Like most of the artists on this site, the consciousness that everything is impermanent is a part of James Grashow’s work. We agree! Cardboard artists should claim the temporary in contemporary art!
James Grashow is a sculptor and teacher of cardboard. He creates large environments: cities, aquaria and crowds of monkeys in a bold, powerful style. His masterpiece is a large fountain, installed outside, where it slowly fell apart due to the weather.
“Corrugated board is a material that understands its mortality, it knows that it’s destined for trash. It is bonded to the human experience. They say that 85% of everything on the planet has spent part of its life in a cardboard box. “
James Grashow’s father had a cardboard factory and he has been making things out of it since he was a child. His main technique is extrusion, connecting two shapes with a strip of cardboard. He approaches cardboard as a sculptor, bending, push and twisting the material into the shape he wants it to be.
He also makes a lot of work in workshops with local participants: like the above Cardbirds workshop and Cardboard fish workshop.
“I am convinced there is a link between corrugated board and creativity. Its very valuelessness liberates us. Boxes, tubes, sheets of corrugated board – everything that lives between the good stuff and garbage – becomes a perfect partner for play. Rescued from trash, it asks only, ‘What do you want me to be?’ Corrugated board is the DNA of creativity. Boxes, glue, tape, knives and a group of willing people can create anything. And have a great time doing it.”
If cardboard ever needs a spokesman, we suggest James Grashow as it’s voice!
Oh yeah and one last thing: he also made a city of out of cardboard once. Too much for this post maybe, but the detail is incredible and the buildings have so much personality!
