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With a thousand cuts and snips and a dab of glue here and there, Danish artist Peter Callesen can transform an ordinary piece of white A4 paper into an 18.2cm tall Babel Tower. Angels and devils, finely detailed leaves falling off a precipice and a waterfall complete with men in boats. These are just some of the end products to emerge from this magical process.

Callesen has also produced works using snow, watercolour and ink, so why is paper, this staple product of everyday life, his preferred choice of material?

“What intrigues me about paper is that it is an ordinary piece of material everybody can relate to,” explains Callesen. “We consume it in huge amounts without realising it. I use it as an art material because it has no value, which is great for me because it means I can construct bigger stories out of it.”  

Callesen weaves narrative references from Greek mythology, Danish fairytales written by the likes of Hans Christian Andersen, and biblical stories, into his framed artworks and paper sculptures. “Most of them [artwork] are small stories. They are almost like small animations,” he explains.

Callesen started out working with cardboard, which he describes as “more trashy” than paper. His first piece using this material was in a performance titled ‘Castle’ produced at Goldsmiths College where he studied. As part of the performance, Callesen, ‘the king’, builds his fairytale castle out of cardboard and tape, but due to rain, the structure weakens and he has to keep rebuilding. Eventually he gives up and he takes his castle down.

“I once did this performance in Helsinki where I did a cut-out, glue it, fold-it-yourself castle. I wanted to do it as if it was impossible. It has a lot to do with what my work is about, trying to do the impossible. On one hand you could say it’s almost a tragic thing. You continue to hope, doing something despite failure,” says Callesen.

This pessimism is also a recurring theme in his paper works. Although he has only been working with paper in the past four years, for him it is more sublime than cardboard. “There is something about the white, the virginity of the white paper,” he explains.

Callesen started experimenting with paper when he discovered that it was possible to frame the image of something emerging from 2D into 3D. For him, it was an investigation between image and sculpture. In ‘Half Way Through’ a 3D skeleton sits upright, but it is still trapped in the 2D A4 paper from which it was cut.

“There is a positive and a negative shape. What I cut away and the image the silhouette leaves,” says Callesen.

Paper is fragile and easily torn. Although beautiful, it is dead wood, and it is this stark reality that Callesen’s work instills in your mind. This is exemplified in work such as ‘Hanging Skin’, a deeply existential piece that features in a new exhibition by Callesen, which opens in London this month.

Work such as Hanging Skin, in which a figure sheds its own skin, are the end result of a carefully crafted and thought out process. First Callesen sketches the work, and then he creates tests, before making the actual piece. This process is realised in ‘Wedding Dress Without Bride’ – carefully folded creases in the bodice and stitching on the dress are all achieved with just paper and glue.

When asked to summarise his work, Callesen says it is “conceptual romantic paper sculptures, with an aspect of something leaning towards the impossible and towards nature”. He likes playing with the contrast between the heaviness of romanticism and its themes, and the lightness of the paper, and he achieves this through an artist’s eye for detail and those thousand tiny cuts.

Peter Callesen’s exhibition ‘Unfolding’ is showing at the Emily Tsingou Gallery from 13 September to 27 October