Guy Laramée carves volcanoes from toilet paper rolls

Another artistic response to the lockdown

Guy Laramée, an interdisciplinary artist based in Montréal whose recent works employ books as a sculptural medium, is widely celebrated for his intricately carved environments into bound book pages, forming dramatic and detailed representations of natural landscapes.

The experience of lockdown at his Montreal studio over the past months presented Laramée with a new artistic medium and narrative to share: toilet paper. Created as a quarantine diary, the artist’s ‘toilet paper diary volcanoes’ tells the tale of a 21st-century panic. Using the same tools as his characteristic book landscapes, Laramée has been spending 6-8 hours daily producing a sculpture made from an ordinary roll of toilet paper, each meticulously sculpted and painted to manifest the form of a volcanic topography.

‘In the midst of the first hours following the announcement of the lockdown, I too found myself unexpectedly shaken by fear’ Laramée shares about the collective feeling of panic during the pandemic.

‘I was in the studio, struggling with my mixed feeling about the whole thing. Suddenly I saw the image of a toilet paper volcano in my mind and I burst out in a roar of laughter. I did not have any rolls near me, so I had to steal one from the public washroom of the building. I raced back to the studio and an hour later I had the first example in my hands. It all came about so quickly, the floodgates opened. I took a picture on my phone, posted it on Facebook the same evening, and received a great response’.

The sculptures depict volcanoes in varying states of activity: from dormant vegetation, lined slopes, to ominously smoking craters and full-blown Vesuvius. Each work is accompanied by a haiku-like title that offers a counterpoint to the sculpture, creating a space for reflection on the anxieties our current global circumstances have provoked.

‘From the onset, I realized that this diary was going to be about mind-states, more than the factual reality of the pandemic” Laramée continues. 

‘It still strikes me how the pandemic formalized the victory of the quantitative over the qualitative. Number of infections, number of hospitalizations, number of deaths, …’

The series can be interpreted from multiple perspectives: as memento mori, symbols of bottled-up anxieties that precede the pandemic; or, an analogy for the explosive creativity the artist experienced in pursuit of this daily project. Laramée intends to continue working on the series throughout the shutdown, the series to date may be viewed in its entirety on JHB Gallery’s Artnet page here.

Art is taking inspiration from toilet and its

Source designboom.com