Cardboard Sculptures

Layered Cardboard Sculptures: Transforming Waste into Art

Cardboard Sculptures is a series of sculptures and reliefs from 1994-. The material of the works in the series is recycled corrugated cardboard. The basic unit for building sculptures is a 2 x 4 cm piece cut out of cardboard, there are thousands of these in sculptures. The shapes of cardboard sculptures often refer to architecture, the pieces of recycled cardboard arranged in different ways create an atmosphere of old architecture’s weathered surface structures modified by time.

How to make cardboard sculptures ?

The material for the cardboard sculptures series was collected from recycling waste boxes around Helsinki’s Kallio. The cardboard of the collected boxes varied in brown and gray tones. The boxes were cut into strips with a Stanley knife and then into brick-like pieces with scissors. When corrugated cardboard boxes are cut in different directions, the side surfaces of a piece cut in different directions look of different types, these pieces created different wall-like surface structures for layered cardboard artworks. Acrylate glue was used to glue the corrugated cardboard pieces together, some of the sculptures in the series have support structures inside.

See also: Color Sculptures Jeans and M the Machine

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Miika Nyyssönen’s cardboard sculptures were first exhibited in an art gallery in his solo exhibition at Galerie Anhava in Helsinki in 1995. Since then, the works from the sculpture series have been exhibited in many exhibitions both in Finland and elsewhere in the world.

In 1998, art historian Altti Kuusamo wrote the following about Miika Nyyssönen’s cardboard sculptures: “The associations created by the cardboard are an important point of departure. These associations are further divided into various material associations with cardboard as the lowest common denominator. Each material association is subtly tested through a wide range of associations with different spheres of life.
Nyyssönen builds material references into narratives where big things become small and small things big. The different scales of the objects encounter within the same installation as dense, urban adjacencies.”