Rogan Brown

Observing one of Rogan Brown’s paper sculptures is like peering through a microscope. His extraordinarily detailed pieces wouldn’t be out of place in a lab. The British artisan, based now in France, is inspired by nature. “From bacteria to trees to neurons to spiral galaxies to subatomic particles. I constantly surf images of nature in all its myriad complexity, always looking for correlations and patterns that I then use in my own work.” The results are delicate and surreal sculptures made from layer upon layer of either hand or laser-cut paper.

Drawing is the foundation of Rogan Brown’s paper creations, as everything starts with detailed drawings that are then hand or laser cut and finally painstakingly hand-mounted in three-dimensional formations. Nature is the starting point for his work: landscape, geology, plants, insects, microbes, cells, molecules, atoms... “and all the various structural patterns and parallels that connect these different manifestations of the natural world”. This aesthetic started to emerge because Rogan lived for ten years in a wild and remote area of southern France, the Cevennes Mountains, in the middle of a forest; everything came from that place and that experience.

Rogan brown creates wall-based relief sculptures from layers of cut paper inspired by all aspects of nature: “from bacteria to trees to neurons to spiral galaxies to subatomic particles”. He constantly researches images of nature in all its myriad complexity, diversity and scale, always looking for correlations, echoes and repeated structures and patterns that he then uses in his own work. Science and scientific imagery are of particular interest as they reveal hidden secrets of the world around us: the microscopic, the cellular and the molecular.

Magnae Chartae Exhibition