Street art / Swoon

So it seems I'm a cou­ple of years late to this par­tic­u­lar artist, but some recent con­ver­sa­tion on the Book Arts list turned me on to Swoon, a NYC street artist. Her medi­um is the cutout — from paper, wood, linoleum — and she attach­es these to walls all over NYC. The paper ones are the most amaz­ing to me; they're like those snow flakes you make in grade school, but life-sized and real­ly elab­o­rate and of peo­ple. Check out this Flickr clus­ter to get a sense of the way that the paper ages on the wall, and the way that this fragili­ty and sense of imper­ma­nence reacts with the rest of the wall. This inter­view in the Morn­ing News has some good detail about her process:

There's some­thing par­tic­u­lar to the images that make me choose that mate­r­i­al … A lot has to do with the lim­i­ta­tions of the mate­r­i­al. The linoleum you can get so much more detail from. Every­thing that has more nuances, I use linoleum. The wood is rougher, but a good rough­ness. The paper is real­ly hard to think about, and so it tends to be sim­pler. With paper, you'd choose sim­ple sub­jects because it's hard to cre­ate an expres­sion. The chal­lenge is to make the cutout so that it can get on the wall as a sol­id unit in two min­utes or less.

Thanks to how­much­longerkill­menow for the photo.