Sculptural paper is a series of appropriation art, basically consisting of photos amended with glue. As in her project “265” Merrild has reworked Edward Lee’s Erotic Bondage as a vantage point for her investigations. In Merrilds work, Lee’s highly aesthetical and indulging photographic venture into the world of bondage is transformed into an abstraction of hanging body-pieces. The strange and alienating representation in Lee’s catalog of tied up “woman-objects” are enhanced by Merrild’s erasing of body features with glue. In this process Merrild creates a simulacrum bereft of its original sexualized representation, and leaving us with connotations of meat hanging in the slaughter house, the bodies abstract and without contents.
The work could easily be misunderstood in turns of using the female body. Merrild do not “use” but instead she by destroying the recognition of the body the awareness of the normally use gets sharpen. The so often used female body becomes suddenly in debate but simply retouchment through the use of glue.
Sculptural paper II is a series of different woman scenes, in apparently bondage postures, created from the beginning of the process by the artist. After, the photos taken by Merrild are amended with glue.