TRASH TO TREASURE

Ever wondered how to reuse toilet paper rolls, instead of simply discarding them? Well, Paris-based artists Anastassia Elias and Junior Fritz Jacquet have found creative ways to transform them into whimsical miniature universes and captivating face masks.

- Anastassia Elias and Junior Fritz Jacquet

From a mother and child observing giraffes at the zoo and rock climbers scaling a mountain, to couples dancing and lionesses jumping through hoops in a circus, Anastassia’s multi-layered, three-dimensional Rouleaux dioramas reproduce scenes from nature and everyday life, which, when backlit, draw your eye, as the characters and objects are brought to life.

As for Junior, who has been passionate about paper from an early age, folding and crumpling techniques are innovated to create objects inspired by the traditional art of origami – resulting in a diverse collection of masks presenting intriguing faces of fictional characters.

ANASTASSIA ELIAS

A self-taught illustrator, painter and collage artist, Anastassia creates narrative artworks that always tell a story, whatever the medium. Drawing in black ink, she uses a pen and her fingers, with her fingerprints forming gradations of grey and shadows. For her torn collages, she manipulates pages and fragments ripped from magazines, packaging and other printed paper, starting with large pieces of paper and progressing to smaller pieces to focus on the details. In her mixed media collage experimentations, some are cut with scissors and a box cutter and some feature gouache or black ink.

In her ongoing Rouleaux series, she creates minuscule scenes inside toilet rolls by carefully affixing tiny paper cutouts to the inner surfaces at varying depths, using manicure scissors, a box cutter, glue and tweezers. She shines a light through them to form shadows and silhouettes. The paper shapes are in the same colour as the toilet roll to give the illusion that they are part of the roll, with each artwork requiring two to three hours to craft. In her creative process, coming up with a concept takes the most time, while the realisation of the piece takes the least.