Eva Jospin and Her Cardboard Forests
Eva Jospin is a sculptor. But she isn’t like a sculptor you have ever encountered before. Eva creates dense, life like forests, trees, forest floors, all out of cardboard. That’s right, cardboard. It is such an interesting contrapuntal choice, that one wonders what her larger point is? Is it just an aesthetic choice? Is it commentary on our destruction of the trees? Is Jospin just over the moon about the process and the effort involved with managing such enormous quantities of items? It’s interesting really.
I have played a bit with crafting out of cardboard. Not a ton. But enough to know that what I’m seeing in these photographs is incredibly difficult to accomplish. I created (and more to the point, maintained) a play house/village/assemblage of cardboard boxes several years ago. I think I kept the village cobbled together for something like 4 years? Mailbox repairs, chimneys reattached. Caved in roofs reassembled. Skylights reframed. New doors and shingles affixed. And the like. I once moaned about a lattice of small squares for light I’d decided to cut in one particular alcove. Cardboard is not fun to cut, at all. So the sheer quantity of material in these pieces is just mind numbing.