Nothing on this board was ever alive. The dragonfly, the mayfly, the butterfly and the long-legged beetle in Entomologist were cut from paper by Makerie Studio, the duo of Julie Wilkinson and Joyanne Horscroft, then laid out like specimens in an old natural history drawer.
Copper outlines, teal veins, an oxblood ground. Even the frame gets little Art Deco fans in its corners.
The dragonfly’s wings are where we got stuck. Each one is a copper outline holding a net of tiny cells, cut out one at a time, with a second teal layer of veining floating just beneath it so the wing reads as something you could see through.
Real dragonfly wings are built on the same plan: a mesh of veins with a thin membrane stretched between them. Makerie simply left the membrane out.
The butterfly is three sheets deep
Seen from the side, the butterfly turns out to be a stack. Navy upper wings with teal and copper eyespots lift away from a copper underwing cut as open lace, and that lace throws its own small shadow on the board. It’s the kind of depth a flat print can’t fake.
The smaller specimens are where the patience shows. The fly gets a striped abdomen and veined wings no bigger than a thumbnail.
The mayfly keeps both of its long tail filaments, which is exactly the detail a less stubborn maker would trim. And the beetle at the bottom of the board has forelegs so long they bend up and over into a frame of their own.
Around all of them, stems of tiny bell flowers and eight-point stars are cut from the same copper paper, so the board reads like a plate from an old field guide that got lifted clean off the page. If you liked the 17th-century painter who signed his name in caterpillars, this is his great-great-grandchild in card stock.
Jellyfish, made to disappear
The jellyfish go the other way. Where the insects are all metal and depth, this is paper trying hard not to be there. The bell of the pale blue one is cut into ribs and lace, the tentacles are long curling ribbons, and against the navy backdrop in Luke Kirwan’s photographs the whole thing looks like it’s mid-drift. If you just came back from our descent into the deep sea, these will feel oddly familiar!
A bouquet that started as wallpaper
Artemis began as a pattern on a wall. House of Hackney’s moody floral wallpaper of the same name was the starting point, and Makerie spent weeks turning it into a bouquet you can walk around. Every flower was drawn in Illustrator first and then built entirely by hand, with petals in burgundy, black and gold layered thick enough to cast shadows on each other.
The sunnier side of the same habit is a meadow they made for an exhibition with Studio Skøi, shown through ByHands, the studio’s Norwegian agency. White daisies, purple blooms, yellow star flowers and fern fronds crowd a pale green ground, framed and hung like oversized specimen panels. Raku Inoue builds insects out of real petals. Makerie builds the petals, and the insects, out of paper.
From the Moss & Fog Shop
Birds, feather by feather
The owl came from the paper, not the other way around. The pair found a sheet printed with old, dusty-looking maps in a small shop in Milan, and decided the bird that suited it best was a petit-duc, the little scops owl. So every feather on Atlas is a scrap of somewhere.
The Golden Goose is the fairy tale version. A goose made entirely of golden paper feathers sits in a cage left slightly ajar, in a black room with a checkerboard floor, while her eggs, each one decorated differently, rest in arched niches cut into the walls. Moroccan architecture was the other inspiration, which explains the arches.
Two makers, three cities, one sheet at a time
Wilkinson works between Oslo, New York and Milan. Horscroft is in London. They’ve run the studio across that distance for years, building window displays for Fortnum & Mason, holiday work for Tiffany and Omega, and even an International Women’s Day Google Doodle. Horscroft apprenticed with the paper artist Zoe Bradley before Makerie took off. They’ve said they fit three or four personal projects into a year around the client work, and that their favorite material is metallic paper, which you can see in every copper wing above.
Their newest special project, Coming Home, trades creatures for impossible staircases and arches under paper suns, more Escher than entomology. It’s lovely. We still keep going back to the bugs.
See more on Makerie Studio’s site and Instagram. Spotted via Inspiration Grid.
Keep exploring: Tina Kraus’ paper creatures, a typewriter folded from one uncut sheet, and the real thing in The Most Amazing Animals on Earth.
