Cardboard for texture and color. It's everywhere and the price is right. Finding the materials, combining them and making this wall sculpture has been energizing and extraordinarily productive  While the approach to these pieces evolved from earlier work, the process of accumulating materials and building the sculpture is relatively  new. Now it's climbing off the wall into three dimensional space.

In the past, I made paintings of traditional materials on a flat surface. Larger pieces were assembled of separate units; at times, colored strips were attached in front of the painted plane to include space and shadows.

Then, drawing and painting on paper became more important to me and it became difficult to justify using costly materials, to create objects that took up lots of space. The drawings became topo maps with lines, colors and symbols. Folded up, just like accordion road maps that are impossible to refold, a year's output fit into a small bin.

Early in 2009 I was "drawing" on paper with a sewing machine. Lines were roads and rivers. Paper and other materials were folded, rolled, attached to these maps. Then, the sewing machine broke. I continued bending, folding, stapling, gluing and adding materials from beyond the studio, from other areas of my life. Domestic leftovers and office supplies became part of the working palette.

I've always liked wrapping materials and corrugated cardboard, slicing with and against the grain to reveal the structure. The hunt, finding unexpected texture and color in a dumpster, is now part of the process. And, I must say, it's part of the fun. These pieces are created in series, depending on the materials at hand. While I'm not primarily interested in the words or numbers on the cardboard, how can you pass up "Fresh Worms" or "Honey"? And now, needing more color, I am using sheets of colored paper that's purchased, and am starting to use painted paper for more variety and permanence.

There is a tension in these pieces between the formal composition and the re-used, rescued materials, some showing scars of their previous function. Although there is no distinct message about recycling, everything counts and there are possibilities in materials that are generally overlooked.

Erica Stoller is an artist moving away from conventional materials and now cutting and gluing discarded packaging, wrapping materials and colored paper to create wall sculpture.

By day, Stoller is the director of Esto, the photo agency and archive specializing in images of architecture. Representing a group of architectural photographers and maintaining a library of images of buildings, interiors and places, she has participated in the world of architecture, design and the related media for many years.

A graduate of Bennington College, her paintings are in the collections of Sony, Bank of Tokyo, Rockefeller Center, Western Pacific, County Federal Savings and Loan, American Health Foundation/Naylor Dana Institute, CTI, Lehman Brothers, Viacom, Reich & Tang and Texaco and a number of private collections.

es@ericastoller.com                914.967.3303