The white walls and ceiling of Marianne Eriksen Scott-Hansen’s atelier were bursting one day last summer with huge, handmade paper flowers, all created to resemble ranunculuses, roses, marigolds, thistles, air plants and passion flowers.
But she dismissed a visitor’s amazement, saying, “Every child in Denmark gets into paper cutting when they can operate a pair of scissors.”
The paper artist, 61, was born in northern Denmark and holds a master’s degree in fashion design from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She had a cult label in the early aughts called Daughters of Style, and her signature slashed tees — scissored by hand, not laser-cut — were worn by such rock and pop stars as Steven Tyler and Lene Nystrom of the Eurodance band Aqua.
She later founded a jewelry line, but paper attracted her more and more as “a material you don’t have to be precious with,” she said.
Paper cutting, or psaligraphy, draws on two Danish traditions. First, letters with paper cuttings and riddles that were traded by Danes from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The letters influenced paper cuttings created by the fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen, and also helped perpetuate the popularity of paper-cut cards still made at Easter today.
The second — cutout silhouettes, which were affordable portraits in the 18th century — inspired the style of the 2-D paper-cut ornaments that Ms. Scott-Hansen began creating in 2014. (The flowers came along soon afterward.) Her ornaments, which could be hung in windows or used as mobiles, were based on the heroes and heroines of such Andersen stories as “The Little Mermaid,” about a sea princess who trades her tongue for legs.
At the time, Marie Laurberg was a curator at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, and mounting a retrospective of Yayoi Kusama. She ordered one of Ms. Scott-Hansen’s paper-cut mermaids as a gift for the Japanese artist.
Ms. Scott-Hansen’s work, then and now, is “very poetic,” said Ms. Laurberg, who has become the director of the Copenhagen Contemporary art center. “But there’s a darkness to it that speaks to the universe of Kusama and to our Nordic fairy tale tradition. It is also in this zone between art and craft. It’s connected to Easter, to Christmas, to craft. But someone like Marianne is able to add layers and play with it as art.”
When Ms. Scott-Hansen dedicated herself to paper art 10 years ago, she mostly switched from 2-D work to creating large 3-D pieces in floral shapes. “She runs away from the flatness,” Ms. Laurberg said.
She occasionally still makes paper cuttings of fairy tale characters and insects such as butterflies and houseflies from black or white card stock or gift wrap paper (from $600). Most of her work, however, is done in kraft paper, tissue paper and wrapping paper — never crepe paper, which she said reminds her of school and hobby projects.
Her embrace of 3-D also required her to move from straightforward scissoring to what she called a “kind of untamed ‘Nordic origami.’” Her techniques include folding paper as well as twisting, wadding, braiding, draping, tugging, twirling, shredding and knotting it. She even uses her feet.
Ms. Scott-Hansen snipped the air with her fingers: “I see cutting opportunities everywhere. When I begin to fantasize about things that shouldn’t be cut, that’s when I know I’m exhausted.”
As for colors, the ombré effect for her ranunculus-rose hybrids, for example, are achieved by layering paper petals cut from 20 to 30 different shades.
She does not like to plan, or to track how much time she has spent on a creation. Instead, she said, she cultivates a mind set in which “the rolls of paper are about to take over — and anything might happen.”
Wild Blooms
Ms. Scott-Hansen’s inspirations range from garden-variety blooms to what she called the “big personalities” of Jurassic-era flowering plants, the corpse flower and carnivorous flora.
Her typical large-format work — in which a single flower head may be as much as 150 centimeters (five feet) in diameter — also is shaped by fantastical scenarios somewhere between the story lines of “Thumbelina,” Andersen’s minuscule girl born from a flower, and “Little Shop of Horrors,” she said with a laugh. “People get close to my flowers and I think they think they’re not tame,” she added. “The flowers might look like they could eat you, but to me they’re peaceful.”
Still, she likes how the works can make people “feel small,” she said. “I love the humbling effect of being confronted with something bigger than yourself. I like being the Thumbelina in this business.”
Ms. Scott-Hansen’s creations also include floral installations and masks, designs that recall Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fruit and vegetable portraits and the Italian glass style of millefiori.
In one example, a mask nearly 100 centimeters tall had a face composed of poppy- and sunflowerlike blooms, tendrils of brown paper twisted with yellow, orange and red ones and a lower fringe of more paper strips ($5,500). “These masks can really look back at you,” she said.
Alana Hadid, a stylist who has carried a couple of Ms. Scott-Hansen’s masks back to her home in Los Angeles, said in a recent phone interview: “I think she is creating a whimsy that’s been lost in this world — I become a child when I’m in her atelier. I probably cry every time I’m there.”
Ms. Scott-Hansen’s creations are available by appointment in Copenhagen and through the Spaceless Gallery, which does pop-up installations at other galleries, hotels and department stores, primarily in Paris and New York. They also have been ordered by fashion houses including Fendi, Dior and Hermès, and Danish institutions such as the Tivoli amusement park, the porcelain maker Royal Copenhagen and the avant-garde restaurant, Alchemist.
As for the future, Ms. Scott-Hansen said she planned to continue exploring “the field where flora meets fauna” and was investigating the role of color. Not long ago, for example, a client asked for a big black rose.
“It looks like a spider on the wall,” the paper artist said. “It’s really black. But in pastels it would’ve looked like it came from a different world.”
