Clouded house – Mia Pearlman's paper wisdom looks amazing

Take those scraps of paper lying around your desk, draw on them, cut pieces from them, tack them up somewhere… and BAM, supersculptures! Well, not quite – far more detail, hard work and concentration occurs in the production of Mia Pearlman’s work, which utilises the layering, sculpting, and light-admitting capabilities of paper to wondrous effect.

Pearlman, born, bred, and based in New York, is strongly inspired by weather patterns, and the manufacture and installation of her work appropriately reflects the transient nature of clouds, rains, and skies. Using basic acid-free drawing paper, she applies abstract linear shapes in India ink, and then cuts these out. Various configurations of such works are then applied to gallery spaces, where various “drawings” are produced by the three-dimensional interplay of paper forms, as well as the shadows they cast.

The installations are never planned in particular detail, but form according to the artist’s instinct during installation-process, and are then taken apart at the end of every exhibition. In this way, the works respond to the space and to the ephemeral qualities of the natural subjects they evoke.