Artist Charles Young created the cover of The List Green Power Players 2023
Charles Young drew inspiration from a trip to the Emerald City 15 years ago to craft the intricate artwork for the cover of the Green List.
Charles Young sees no limit to the beauty hidden in a building’s walls – especially when the structure is about the size of your thumb.
The Scottish architect’s art-love story started the way many do – in an abysmal job market and a crippled economy. In 2014 he challenged himself to create one architectural work out of paper a day, and nine years on, he jokes “it’s still my job.”
When creating the cover for this year’s edition of The List: Green Power Players, Young, 32, put together what he calls an “impressionist” portrait of Sydney made entirely out of watercolour paper, slicing miniature figures with a scalpel and glueing them together to be photographed for a final portrait.
Better known as Paperholm, Young says he was inspired by memories of a visit to the city 15 years ago.
“There’s something nice about a place that is going to be instantly recognisable,” he says.
“Not every city in the world has that kind of feature where someone could look at it and know immediately where it is.”
The cover is composed of over 70 handmade pieces. Young says he leveraged conventions of the city’s architecture – building lines, window shapes, key landscape features.
“Creating spaces like this are completely free and you can do things that you wouldn’t be able to do in a real building,” he says.
“Working on a small scale gives you that kind of freedom where you don’t have to think about gravity or building regulations or whatever. It kind of gives you control over something that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to create in reality.”
By snapping hundreds of images to create a “stop motion”, he brings the paper city to life, as cars drive through crowded harbourside streets, boats sail under the bridge and trees bustle in the wind.
Aligning with The List’s celebration of sustainability and innovation, Young says his art evokes the values of “recycling and reusing” existing buildings. He prioritises breathing new life into facades instead of “tearing them down because it’s easier to build something new”.
“More recent buildings aren’t valued, because they don’t have a history yet,” he says.
“It takes buildings surviving the period when people don‘t value them for them to last. That’s why, I guess, I turn to imagination – bringing a new look into things we’re familiar with so they don’t go to waste.”
The List: Green Power Players is available online and in print on Friday
More Coverage
