A4 Paper Festival

Overview

As soon as I was old enough to hold a pencil I have been doodling, writing and creating on paper, using it as a canvas for other creativity. Later on, I would get bored in class and fold paper airplanes and occasionally an origami fortune teller. Since this was the limit of my skills, I was under the assumption that this was the limit of paper as a platform and a creative form. The inaugural A4 Paper Festival looks set to shatter every preconception i've held about the use of paper.

Organised by the Paper Convention Collective, the festival will gather Australian and international paper artists - including Japan's Yoshinobu Miyamoto, the UK's Hattie Newman, the US's Jesse Brown and our own Benja Harney. The Festival will go over 6 days, including lectures, workshops and exhibitions highlighting the diverse applications of paper: from installation art to sculptures to animation to self-published zines. Based out of The Paper Mill in Angel Place, 'spotlight' events will be held across Sydney including Object Gallery in Surry Hills and the Design and Architecture School at the University of Sydney.

The Paper Convention Collective is a group of artists and designers dedicated to documenting the Paper Expressionist movement. The brain-child of Lisa Loxley, a fourth generation printer and greeting card extraordinaire, the Collective aims to create a support network for designers on a grass roots level as well as a platform for showcasing established and emerging artists.

The appeal of paper art is its approachability. We've all folded a paper airplane or a paper crane. The Collective point out that paper is coming back in a big way as a 'backlash to the mass-market digital design style'. Maybe they're true and maybe we have had enough of the computer screen and miss the intimacy of paper. Or maybe it's just purely tactile memories of being bored in class and escaping into imagination through folding.