Ana Čavić
Papercut Poetry (Garden of Lost Things), 2020–ongoing
series of papercuts
42 x 59,4 cm, 21 x 29,7 cm
courtesy of the artist
Ana Čavić’s Papercut Poetry series offers mythopoetic re-interpretations of scenes from myths, folk tales, fairy tales, fables and legends. Often set in nature, for Papercut Poetry (Garden of Lost Things) the artist has made a further thematic selection from the series, focusing on magical and mystical interpretations of natural phenomena. These fantastical visual narratives, in which artist re-imagines visual poetics by using a vocabulary of symbols to explore narrative through purely visual means, reflect our enduring fascination with nature, which was once also thought to be the cause of supernatural phenomena. The artist collects these “lost things” – supernatural phenomena that continue to haunt our dreams and capture our imaginations – situating them in an imaginary “garden” for our further contemplation. The artist makes the papercuts using the multi-fold papercutting technique. Using a pair of scissors, she cuts into a folded piece of paper “blindly”, producing an intuitive “drawing with scissors” that is only revealed once the paper is unfolded. The fragile nature of the papercuts lends them a certain ephemerality while the folds, which reveal how the papercuts were made, serve to subtly reinforce their sculptural properties. For EKO 9 Čavić created a new work in the series, The Prophecy (2024), drawing inspiration from the Heathen Maiden.
Garden of Lost Things, 2020, papercut, 21 x 29,1 cm, courtesy of the artist, photo: Damjan Švarc
Ana Čavić is a visual artist, performer, poet and academic researching ‘performance storytelling’. Her interdisciplinary practice combines the visual and performing arts and she works across different media and fields, including art, literature and theatre. She creates works on paper, collages, papercuts, artist publications, digital poetry animation, interactive poem objects and theatrical storytelling performances. Most recently, she has been exhibiting and performing her piece A Thread Without End (2017–), which is an ongoing series of ‘visual storytelling performances’ staged in discrete acts. Each act of A Thread Without End features original poetry and a specially devised visual aid – a paper scroll (Act I, 2017), a tiled paper map (Act II, 2019), papercut puppets (Act III, 2021) and a set of paper hand fans (Act IV, 2023) – which she uses to tell a never-ending story in verse, in various analogue and digitally augmented formats inspired by historical performance storytelling traditions.
