The Red Sands Garden

A stroll in the Australian Royal Botanic Gardens, Cranbourne, Melbourne. Part 1/3.

On entering the The Red Sands Garden, the visitor is treated to a landscape design of colour and breathtaking view that is so like experiencing Australia’s Red Centre, it almost needs focal adjustment. For the flora that thrives here, it’s in fact a harsh yet wonderous environment supporting only tough plants of short stature, often bearing fascinatingly beautiful floral structures like those of the Desert Rose and bizarre, aptly named Kangaroo Paws. Bottle brush flowers like Banksia make a popular source of nectar for pollinating birds like Helmeted Honeyeaters.  A closer look reveals fan shaped Scaevola half-flowers and curious Lichen covered forms looking like branched abstract sculptures.

Second Prize, Botanicals Exhibition, LightSpaceTime Gallery, Florida, USA 2018

Equal Second Prize, Botanicals Exhibition, The ArtRoom Contemporary Gallery, USA 2019

Sculptured from Hahnemuhle (Germany) 300gsm cotton NOT, Arches (France) 310gsm cotton hot-pressed mould made papers and a variety of handmade Hemp, Flax and Kozo (Mulberry) papers from Awagami (Japan) and other Asian sources, some as light as 4gsm. Single colour ink wash background.

About Ray Besserdin

32-year career recognized with over 30 local and international awards. Works hang in private and corporate collections in London, Munich, Manhattan, Tokyo, New Zealand and throughout Australia. Entirely self-taught techniques of sculpting dimensionally using only sheet-formed papers creating works that are much like bas-relief. Ray's palette of papers are mostly mould-made cottons and a wide variety of mulberry, hemp and flax fibred stocks from Europe and Asia. The extreme beauty of the papers is best appreciated when viewing the originals where the delicate translucence of some of the papers can truly be seen, some of which are a mere 4gsm.  The largest works astound viewers for their rigidity, while all made from paper.  Sculptures range from miniature to free-standing pieces over 6 by 3.8 metres. Ray's styles can be abstract to figurative ultra-realism though he calls his signature style “Impressionist Sculptured Paper” for its use of torn, raw pieces arranged to form the subject matter.  While likeness is important, the focus is to capture emotion, life and expression over realism yet always revealing the character of the papers from which the subjects are sculptured. Nature is his favourite subject matter. Most works will take between 3-6 weeks to complete, are extremely archival and guaranteed to last many generations.  

https://papersculptureartist.com/