Chaotic cities captured through paper engineering

Beautiful, thought provoking, intricate yet neat. These terms describe  best the work of paper engineer Sachin George Sebastian.

With his latest exhibition ‘Metropolis and City-Planners’, Sachin searches for a reason why people are attracted to a City along with depicting the changes that the city is going through. 

A graduate of communication design from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and a native of Kerala, Sachin felt the need to translate ideas through paper after seeing a pop up book at a house of used bookstore in Bangalore. 

“Simplicity in paper as a medium and geometry as the tool fell perfectly into place. So I started exploring the idea, I could not have done this in a fixed job, so I started freelancing. This left me with enough time to learn the art of paper engineering. Within two years I grasped on paper engineering,” says the 27-year old artist. 

He was working on idea of ‘Metropolis and City-Planners’ for over a year. Being in the City and going through its changes, he aims to search why people including he get attracted to the City. 

For this exhibition he has created a huge wooden tree which has no leaves. Its branches are loaded with buildings, skyscrapers, mobile towers, electricity towers, signifying the sacrifice of natural habitat for accommodating the ever-increasing population. The floor right below the tree has hundreds of human figures cut out of waste newspaper signifying the falling leaves and high population.

“The cities were built for human being’s growth. But if they keep growing at this pace, uncontrollably, it will be disastrous for them. I used newspaper for making human figures because newspaper is diary of the nation,” he tells Metrolife.

“Even though the City has a monstrous approach to people, it wears a beautiful outfit to attract everyone to live within, a sort of carnivorous plant types. The beauty you see from far is deceptive. One gets trapped within, only to feel the monstrosity of the metropolis,” says Sachin. 

He has conveyed the same message of urbanisation taking over natural habitat in four of his artwork - again made out of paper. Models of buildings neatly made out of white paper convey what he resents the most concrete cityscapes with sharp corners and wires all around.

“My works are the result of the collision between things I love – nature and organic beauty etc. and the things I resent – industrialisation, cityscapes sharp corners and wires blocking the skylines etc. This collision brings certain common patterns in my work – a cross-reference that acts as my inspiration,” he says. 

Sachin also makes pop up books for children using paper engineering, which is now being recognised as a profession. “Paper engineering is a combination of origami and kirigami. It involves not only folding of paper of cutting and pasting also,” he says. The exhibition at India International Centre will be on till September 2.