Sculptor Eva Jospin constantly reinvents the idea of what a forest is over and over again. She cuts, layers, arranges, glues and builds cardboard into different interpretations of The Woods. Her pieces range from smaller 2D pictures compiled from dense sticks, branches and flaky bits of wood, to life size 3D installations that you are invited into, and can move around within. For Jospin, cardboard is just the medium for a larger message; these trees express many things.

In an interesting juxtaposition, sculptor Eva Jospin creates enchanting forests from cardboard. The Paris-based artist, cuts and glues cardboard to craft dense, multi-layered and highly detailed forests with stunning depth of field. Gazing into the trees can nearly make a viewer fear getting lost in the woods. The cardboard’s corrugated edges form a convincing texture for the bark of the trees, and the paper’s natural color works well with the forest theme. Jospin’s project is valuable not only as an intriguing piece of art, but also because it reminds us of the true origin of the paper products we so often take for granted.

The forest – an incarnation of nature in the wild – is above all the setting in traditional storytelling of tests of courage, and can be a gloomy or initiatory place. The forest is also where one encounters oneself. This walk through the forest initiates the visit to ‘ Inside’, which is also an inner journey.

Jospin uses a corrugated cardboard not only durable, robust, strong, and supportive, but also fragile, impermanent, raw and insubstantial. She plays on these two points of view – they mirror the actual qualities of trees, nature and our relationship to it. The poetic attachments to Josie’s Forest pieces aren’t lost on her critics either:

To look at a forest is an optical experience that challenges the typical laws of perspective in western representation. Facing visually the depth of a forest means to forget the horizon, it means to get lost. And is not the danger of getting lost the only risk tied up to that natural labyrinth that is a forest? 

Check out more of her work here.

ED MCCORMICK

Edmund McCormick is the founder of Cape Crystal Brands and EnvironMolds LLC. He is the author of several non-fiction “How-to” books, past publisher of the ArtMolds Journal Magazine, editor of Beginner's Guide to Hydrocolloids, and author of six eBook recipe books available for download on this site. He resides in Far Hill, NJ and lives and breathes his art and food blogs as both writer and editor. You can follow him on Twitter and Linkedin.