Meet the artist creating life-size sculptures of endangered animals from cardboard

Cardboard comes from everywhere, so it's always manufactured in slightly different ways. You have different tones of cardboard and different textures. Initially, it was such an exciting experience tearing it and figuring out how I could use the corrugated cardboard to represent the flanges of an orangutan's face, or wrinkling paper to capture the depth and the wisdom of an elephant's skin. So, I've always wanted to be an artist ever since I was a kid. My two passions have been animals and art. In school, I had quite a traditional portraiture background. I was doing life drawing, oil painting, and I fell in love with that. As the years went by in my education, I had another passion. I started to play around with found and recycled materials. On my way to school, I would see things and I would start to imagine manipulating them and turning them into something else. After university, I decided to travel for a year. Traveled all over Asia, spent an amazing four months in India, where I got the majority of my inspiration, and when I came home, made a whole portfolio about my experiences in India. And luckily, that show went well enough for me to go away again. And this time, I felt really excited about going to see animals in the wild, having more experiences like that. So, I set off to South America and Central America, volunteered in Costa Rica with howler monkeys and sloths, rehabilitating them. It was also a really important experience because when you think about seeing animals, you think, oh, it's going to be so exciting, it's going to be magical. But I think everywhere I went, there was a tinge of sadness at the fact that we have destroyed a lot of these ecosystems. Specifically, plastic waste, you can see almost anywhere in the world. I would dive in really remote places, and you would still see coke cans and cigarettes and bottles on the shores, and you realize the extent of the damage we've done to our world. I think that's something that really informed my decision to work with cardboard. So, I often work on five or six sculptures at the same time. The initial process is similar to how a child would make a balsa sculpture. It's slotting cardboard together to create cross sections to build a form. And then, as the process nears its completion, I'm working with single layer cardboard, which is more malleable. And as I get to the finer details, I'm using paper and bits of magazines and torn pieces of cardboard and trying to capture those really fine details. I always want people to have an emotional connection with the animal. So, those tiny details, the intensity of the eyes and the placement of the different characteristics is the thing that takes me the longest time. And often, I'll be very close to finishing one piece, and then I just need to look at it for two weeks to figure out those tiny little details. I'm really delighted to say I've raised over £10,000 now for different wildlife conservation charities. I'm hoping to do a lot more.