Surrounded in her Massachusetts studio by pins, glue, and piles of brightly colored paper strips, a visitor might initially mistake Lisa Nilsson for a reclusive arts and crafts teacher. But as her nimble hands purposefully curl the paper into shapes, and then magically weave the shapes into identifiable forms, a new impression emerges. Nilsson is revealed as a highly skilled visual artist who has resurrected a nearly forgotten technique of image making—and to extraordinary ends—by using it to recreate anatomical cross-sections. With her humble materials, she is looking into the deepest, most intimate recesses of the human body, to expose not gore, but rather glorious abstract patterns of spirals and folds.
Nilsson’s cross-sections are constructed through a process known as quilling. Originally popular with nuns and aristocratic women in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, the technique involves combining decorative coils of paper into images that have a filigree-like effect. Her mastery of the archaic medium extends to a variety of forms and marks, created by cutting and pressing the colorful strips with knives, pins, needles, tweezers, dowels, and drill bits. The result is a series of roughly life-sized images of about a quarter inch thickness, which mimic the anatomical models on which her works are based.
This unique series was born in 2008, when Nilsson discovered an old Crucifix made of quilled paper in a second-hand store. She was intrigued enough by the medium that she began experimenting with it for some assemblages as a way to add to her decorative vocabulary. Soon after, she was given a link to a website which included an early twentieth-century anatomical cross section by the French surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen.
The timing was fortuitous. Nilsson had already found an organic quality in experimenting with paper, and had begun to think of the springy coils as an analogy for human flesh. “The fleshy, malleable quality struck me early on,” she explains. “I made a little experiment creating the internal organs depicted in a small anatomical engraving out of quilled paper even before encountering that first inspirational French cross-section image. It was the paper’s willingness to conform in shape to fill a cavity and its springy, bouncy quality when coiled that made me think of flesh and anatomy.”