Paper Sculptures

Featuring the renowned contemporary artist’s boundary-crossing collages, photographs, sculptures, and videos, Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts opens to Members on May 29. Kristen Gaylord, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, guides us through Erin Shirreff’s inventive translations of form across media, challenging traditional divisions and definitions.

An artist as inventive as Erin Shirreff finds inspiration in what others might have discarded. Tracing her creative reuse through four different series demonstrates how she translates forms through multiple materials, from three to two dimensions and back again. In the end, as in a game of telephone, what comes out the other side is both wholly familiar and wholly new.

The earliest work, Shirreff’s Monograph (no. 6) (2017), appears to picture five large metal sculptures on sheets of paper creased like unbound book spreads. The objects, however, are small tabletop works Shirreff created out of delicate materials like paper and foam board. Further, after closer inspection, mismatched shadows and physical impossibilities reveal that the facing sides of each sheet are of different objects. Rather than pages from a disassembled monograph, these photographs are invented presentations of imagined artworks, raising questions about how we experience and interpret the world around us.

Making these temporary sculptures produced a lot of scraps, to which Shirreff gave new life in works like the cyanotype Cuttings (2018). Cyanotypes are one of the oldest photographic processes, made by exposing a photosensitive surface, in this case muslin, to sunlight or another ultraviolet source. The resulting prints are shades of blue, with white where the light was blocked. Shirreff used stencils based on her discards to achieve the geometric shapes of Cuttings. She then tore the printed fabric and reassembled its strips, building an abstract composition that recalls paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Georgia O’Keeffe in the Museum’s second-floor galleries.

Now enlarged, Shirreff’s cast-off shapes continued their material journey, this time into metal. Her photo assemblages, such as Paper sculpture (2024), are built of images of artworks from obscure sculpture anthologies. Shirreff transferred fragments of the photographs to smooth aluminum sheets that reflect the forms of her reused scraps, layering color, texture, and scale. Her recycling of existing artworks to create original compositions mirrors her reuse of cast-offs, shifted into new sizes
and mediums.

Finally, the aluminum sheets cut out for the photo assemblages left behind negative space that inspired Shirreff’s recent Drop sculptures. In works like Drop (no. 18) (2024), large pieces of steel lean against the wall with a seeming casualness that belies their mass and the artist’s careful arrangement. Whereas in Monograph (no. 6), paper was made to look like metal sculpture, now, after multiple translations, it has become just that. By tracing this process, we understand how the artist transformed what was small into something monumental and what was headed for the recycling bin into something permanent.

Learn more about the exhibition and related programs at mam.org/erin-shirreff.

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Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts

Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts
May 30–Aug 31, 2025

Member Preview Day + Opening Conversation, May 29
Artist Talk, Aug 7

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Image: Erin Shirreff, Paper sculpture (detail), 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York