Jen Stark
Jen Stark's love of scissors goes way back. "I remember when I was little, I would wake up early, still in my pajamas, and I remember this one time I was cutting, maybe I was making a collage," she recalls. "I was cutting and cutting and I cut through my pajamas and I was afraid I was going to get in trouble for that."
Twenty years later, Stark is still cutting, but instead of collages, she creates paper sculptures bursting with color. The 25-year-old Miami artist, who recently won a $15,000 South Florida Cultural Consortium grant, began making paper sculptures while studying in France during her junior year of college.
"I wasn't able to bring too much stuff with me, so I just brought clothes and was planning to buy art supplies there," she says. "But everything was so expensive. I went into the art store trying to find something cheap, but with a lot of potential. I bought a stack of assorted construction paper and started playing with it, and yeah, paper sculptures happened."
Simple as that sounds, paper sculptures as intricate as Stark's take time to create. "The 12-by-12-inch ones usually take from three to five days," she says, "and the larger ones can take from a week to two and a half weeks." But that's nothing for an artist who spent 100 days last year cutting 1 million scraps of colored paper for a project titled "How To Become a Millionaire in 100 Days."
After cutting 10,000 pieces a day for about 3 1/2 months, she had a colorful, million-piece scrap pile and her hands were in rough shape—as was her brain. "Toward the end of it, I was getting sick of it and wanting the piece to actually be finished," she admits. "I was kind of tired."
