Where does this door lead to?

My love affair with cardboard began during an internship at Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. B&P uses cardboard to make huge puppets, both by cutting and painting flat pieces and deconstructing it to use in papier mache. But Bread and Puppet exists on a farm with lots of wide open space...my studio is tiny and is more conducive to small-scale work.

I also love the sculptural nature of doors, and their symbolic meaning as markers of the transition from one state of being to another. So as I was relaxing at the end of a yoga class one day, the thought came to my mind: make miniature doors out of cardboard.

I experimented with a very simple door, just to see how to build the door, the frame,

and the base.

Once I understood the basics, I moved on to a more ambitious project: a blue door based on a picture of a door in Scotland that I saw in a fantastic book called Doors of the World by Jean-Phillipe Lenclos (New York: W. W. Norton, (c) 2005). Everything in this piece is made of repurposed cardboard except the doorknob, letter slot, the number, and the window pane. Probably the biggest challenge was making the strips of grout to go between the wall stones. The scale is basically 1 inch - 1 foot (1:12).

My next door was the secret garden door. I looked at several images online, and was mostly inspired by the one shown below. For this project, I made pulp from the corrugated part of cardboard for the "mortar" part of the wall. The "stones" were made from the top layer of various pieces of cardboard, edges folded under. The most challenging part of this project was making the tiny gate handle and hasp. I can say with confidence that every part of this project was made with cardboard or cardboard-derived materials.

My third door was quite ambitious - a big leap forward in terms of complexity and detail. I took my inspiration from a black-and-white picture of a door in Queretaro, Mexico.

The inspiration photo was not a full shot and it was taken from a side angle, so I had to make several scale drawings, making assumptions about the actual size of the real door.

While I used mostly cardboard with the correct colors (at least according to a grayscale photo), I did have to resort to painting the decorative surface elements and the lozenge shapes above the door. I also had to use small metal rings and tiny beads to create the circular door decorations.

So much went into the painstaking but ultimately rewarding process of creating this door, it really needs a blog post of its own!

Please let me know if you have a door that you'd like to see reproduced in miniature by using the Contact form to send me a message. Let's talk!