One particular tree on a particularly beautiful sunset at Beachy Head on the South Coast gave rise to this and its inverse twin, the aptly named, ‘Bend not break’.

We’ve often been intrigued by the hardy resilience of the trees dotted along the cliffs of the South Coast that are bent almost completely over by the prevailing winds. In many ways they are wonderful metaphor for the strength of being able to bend under pressure and not break. This one particular evening we’d been photographing some teasels that grown on the cliff edge which also feature in a number of our papercuts. What made this one particular tree stand out like never before was the fact it was a completely still evening with even the sea being mill-pond calm.

We originally just thought it would make a fantastic photograph (it did!) but the more we looked at it the more we wondered to what degree we could capture the intricacy of the branches in a papercut. This led to a number of failed attempts as we tried different sizes and different paper varieties, none of which seemed to work. We abandoned our efforts for a while but then one day I was looking at the original photograph and was reminded of the famous ‘Bend not break’ quote by Albert Camus from the Outsider.

This led to a considerable reworking of the design as we began selectively removing and editing branches within the structure of the tree to incorporate the quotation in such a way that people might catch glimpses of a letter or word and then be drawn into the design to discover the full message and meaning. There then followed days of painstakingly intricate cutting with each of us working on a version in case either of us made a mistake. Fortunately our hands were steady and our cutting true which resulted in 2 different finished pieces – this one here which is white on black and a sister piece which is black on white (see HERE).

Signed by the artists, ‘Bend not break’ is a genuine 1/1 comprising an original hand cut, papercut, back mounted on archival quality mountboard and framed in in a black, custom-made solid wood box frame.

Framed dimensions: 870 mm (w) x 625 mm (h)

£1000