A pop-up exhibition by Cabinet of Curiosity Studio celebrates the architecture of the North East through large scale kirigami pop-up paper models and construction toys of 10 landmarks
The exhibition marks the culmination of the ‘Grand Constructions’ arts project that took place online and in-person during 2021. As the project was a public realm commission for Creative Darlington, the exhibition has been situated in a vacant shop space in the Queen Street Shopping Centre as opposed to a conventional art space. In doing this we hope to help the regeneration of the high street, by animating an empty space, as well as attracting an audience for the work who may not usually engage with the arts. The decision to exhibit work on the high street was also informed by working during the pandemic, when traditional art venues and museums had to close to the public. Exhibiting in shop window spaces reduces the risk of our exhibition not being accessible to a live audience.
In considering how to exhibit our ten architectural models, we were inspired by the work of the 19th Century architect John Sloane whose work was illustrated by Joseph Gandy. The way that Gandy depicts Soane’s work is very theatrical and reads like a scenographic stage design of a cityscape comprised of built and unbuilt architecture projects layered together.
One of the challenges we had to overcome was how to animate a large, vacant shop space on a minimal budget. The main window was 8 metres wide and our models would have been lost without a visual focus. We decided that it was necessary to screen off the shop space by using a backdrop that could also be a display unit for the models. The Eames ‘Giant House of Cards’ construction toy informed the design of a giant slotted installation made out of hundreds of laser cut honeycomb cardboard pieces. The cardboard construction took a few days to fabricate using a laser cutting machine and took the two of us just over one day to slot together in its entirety. Laser cut stencil lettering using a blue and ivory colour scheme topped the display and titled our work.
The paper models used kirigami (cut and fold) techniques and drew upon our growing expertise in paper engineering pop-up forms. Initially Edmond drew up the files for each model using CAD software with Caroline prototyping and refining these into paper engineered models. We wanted these to be large scale to maximise their impact and used one sheet of A1 paper at 300gsm weight per model. These were then backed onto an A1 sheet of contrasting gold paper before folding into a pop-up card form. The pop-ups required additional cardboard reinforcement to work at that scale and working on these models to troubleshoot material challenges has been very informative for future projects.
We used a smaller window that was part of the same shop space to showcase the construction paper toy models available for the public to download and make at home. The colour printed models of the Gaunless Bridge, Darlington Clock Tower, Baltic Flour Mills and Sydney Harbour Bridge were displayed as flat sheets and in folded form. The models are available to download for free from our company website:
Special thanks to the people and organisations who helped us on our creative journey:
Arts Council England for funding this project through their National Lottery Project Grants programme and showcasing our paper toys in their Creative Lowdown newsletter;
Stephen Wiper at Creative Darlington for funding and facilitating this commission;
Darlington Arts Festival for programming and hosting a family workshop;
Head of Steam Darlington Railway Museum for their project support, use of their archive and for hosting a family workshop;
Queen Street Shopping Centre for hosting the pop-up exhibition;
Fun Palaces for promoting our Sydney Harbour Bridge online activity;
Culture Bridge North East for profiling our paper craft resources in their education compendium.
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