The most challenging of our original designs to date, ‘Never Surrender’ took us to, and beyond what we thought our limits were.

In what is a hugely important year for remembering the sacrifices of the second world war and especially the leadership role of Sir Winston Churchill, we wanted to add our own commemoration but wondered how best to do so in a papercut work of art. For us the most immediate associations of Sir Winston were the iconic face the incredibly powerful speeches he delivered.

We looked to take those two elements and experiment with a range of designs to see how best we could use them to come up with something instantly recognisable and truly memorable. Little did we know the finished papercut would turn out to be not just the most complex design we have undertaken to date, but also the most complicated to actual cut by hand.

In terms of the design, we had to manually ensure each individual letter of Sir Winston’s legendary “We shall never surrender” speech, delivered to Parliament in 1940, was attached to at least one other letter and then ensure no block of letters was left perilously hanging to the main body of the design by just a single sliver of paper. This itself took several days and only the most meticulous checking averted what would have been a disaster when we realised there was a couple of tiny gaps which would have ruined the whole design when we came to cut it.

As for the cutting, we estimated that the final piece involved over 5000 individual scalpel cuts, by hand, many measuring between 0.5 and 2.5 mm. The tiniest slip in the vast majority of these would have ruined the final work so again it was a case of little and often. In fact, it took so long and got so stressful that we contemplated abandoning the project. However, we drew courage and strength from the words we were cutting out and persevered which resulted in the stunning unique work you see here. Out of all the original works we have ever created, this is the one that we have both adamantly said we will NEVER cut again!!!

Signed by the artists, ‘Never surrender’ is a genuine 1/1 original hand cut, papercut, overlaid on an RAF roundel print, back mounted on archival quality mountboard and framed in a black, custom-made solid wood box frame.

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

£1000