After years at the cutting table honing her craft, artist Lisa Lloyd is sculpting paper into high-end art forms that are exciting private collectors and commercial customers.
At first, Lloyd chose paper as an art material for its vast range of colours and styles available at a good price. Then she discovered it was much more than that.
“It’s the texture and graphic nature of paper that can imitate life,” explains Lloyd, whose signature skill is in sculpting paper to portray movement. This might be by giving the appearance of a bird ruffling its wing feathers or creating the inward crashing wave effect of a spiraling nautilus shell.
The different weight and strength of paper also lend themselves well to her art, with a thick card for the internal structure of a bird then lighter paper for the outer work, and wire coated tissue paper for the feet.
A hummingbird comes to life
Lloyd spent much of her early career in animation, including running her own company in Soho, in London, in the 1990s, making commercials for big musicians like Beck, Kanye West, and the Bee Gees. But she missed working with her hands and using real materials, especially paper.
“The need for a change was also linked to getting married and leaving London to start a family,” Lloyd confides, “as well as dealing with a partial burnout and a bigger health scare.”
Around 2010, she recalls “I had a hummingbird in my head. I needed to realise it somehow.” With a few A4 sheets of paper, scissors and glue, she worked her vision into a 2D collage. Lloyd liked the result. Next, she created a small prawn in 3D and then she was hooked.
Something natural
From there, Lloyd worked behind the scenes on her paper sculptures, gradually building a portfolio and a small following.
Lloyd’s career shift coincided with a larger shift in art styles at the time. “People were turning away from the glossy 3D images of the ‘90s that had saturated our eyeballs,” says Lloyd, “and were looking towards something more natural and homemade.”
This low-fi trend was also catching on with big companies wanting to be perceived as more ‘touchy feely’ by their customers.
Building her business
Even with having the right product, finding the right price was hard. “If art is made of gold, then the perceived value is that it’s expensive,” Lloyd explains. “But if it’s made of paper, the product might be seen as cheap.”
Lloyd’s work is labour intensive, each piece taking weeks or months. Just one of Lloyd’s birds needs as many as 4,000 individual paper pieces, all hand-scored, fringed and painstakingly glued like tiny slates on a dollhouse roof. Lloyd saw that Instagram would be a game changer in raising her products’ perceived value and began trying to boost her followers. “I’d never worked so hard for so little,” she recalls. Then suddenly things started to happen.
Getting the big break
In 2017, Waitrose Magazine commissioned a sculpture of a Blue Tit from Lloyd, which ultimately went onto their cover. “Suddenly people were calling me,” Lloyd enthuses, “and my followers started to grow.” The Blue Tit was shipped to Milan, then the Times of London got interested, followed by Elle and then the BBC, where their interview with her became the most watched story for 24 hours after it was aired. After that, her Instagram followers spiked to 24,000. Lloyd was launched.
Today, she has a surplus of commissions and can no longer imagine doing anything else. In particular, Lloyd says, “I can’t imagine ever not working with paper!”
