A coffee ring on page forty and a spine gone soft as an old tea towel make a paperback ready for the charity shop bin, yet to Su Blackwell that same wear reads like the patina on a much-washed linen sheet. She buys such books, or lets them find her, and then takes a scalpel to them.
Blackwell studied textiles at the Royal College of Art, graduating with an MA in 2003, and the training shows in how she handles a page. She cuts, layers and builds depth the way a maker builds up cloth, and the results are small glowing worlds of woodland, cottage and moonlit path, set inside glass domes or wooden boxes. Her first sculptures grew out of this practice, and the V&A and the Brontë Parsonage Museum have since added her work to their collections. She also designed the Wild Flowers Art Fabric for Liberty London, which now sits in their Classics Collection, so the leap from paper to printed cotton turns out to be a short one.
Su Blackwell, Uprooting, 2022. Paper cut sculpture with high wooden box wall hanging.
Her new exhibition, Pathway of Crumbs, opens at Long & Ryle in London with a private view on Wednesday 25 November, 5 to 8pm. It brings together fourteen sculptures, animations and installations, all made from found books. Their fraying edges and foxed pages stay visible on purpose, much as a darn or a faded patch stays visible on a favourite jumper. Every mark is a record of hands that came before.
Su Blackwell, Words are Like Water, 2026. Paper cut sculpture with glass box.
Su Blackwell, Observer Book of Birds, 2025. Paper cut sculpture with glass dome.
The show has a personal route behind it. After moving from London to Hastings as a single mother, Blackwell found that life by the sea gave her room to think about the landscape and the folklore around her, and it sent her back to her shelves of fairy tales. The title comes from Hansel and Gretel, and anyone who has ever followed a thread out of a tangle will understand the appeal. Her trail of crumbs wanders, doubles back and feeds the birds along the way, and the exhibition treats that wandering as a story about reclaiming her own voice. The writers Marina Warner and Angela Carter, who both turned old tales into sharp, grown-up reading, are named as companions on the walk.
Su Blackwell, If I Could Give You All the Treasure, 2025. Paper cut sculpture with glass dome.
Paper is a stubborn subject for an artist who wants her work to last. Blackwell has hung it in forests and buried it in the earth to see how long it holds out, which will ring a bell with anyone who has stood in front of a scrap of excavated textile and wondered how it survived at all. The glass domes in this show act as both guard and container, keeping the delicate stories safe while letting the light inside do its work.
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Further Information:
Su Blackwell: Pathway of Crumbs runs until 25 January 2027 at Long & Ryle. The gallery is located at 4 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4PX, and is open Monday to Friday, 10am to 5:30pm.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Su Blackwell, Kamouflage II, 2025. Paper cut sculpture and glass dome.
All image photography by Rebecca Brooker and courtesy of Long & Ryle.