As an artistic medium, paper is doing very well. Canadian Kristi Malakoff stands out among the artists that have chosen it, thanks to the versatility of her skills. 
Malakoff‘s outstanding skills allow her create life-sized installations like Maibum, where the precise and meticulous cuts on black paper perfectly restitute the graceful lightness of a May Pole dance. 
But Malakoff also creates miniaturized works with money and stamps. With patient and sapient fingers, she realizes poetic three-dimensional scenes, filled with grace and a delicate humour. While stamps become the flat platform from which people and animals free themselves, banknotes are alternatively used for complexly folded origami or little theaters.
A committed poetic imagination characterises all Malakoff‘s artworks, as the way she uses banknotes demonstrates. In fact, the artist imagines scenes and sketches conceived according to the country from where the money comes. From a Turkish banknote she imagined children homaging an authority, probably the president. When sapiently folded, Nicaraguan money let emerge a colourful market stand where a woman is selling fruit.
Of course, book pages could not escape Malakoff‘s hands and she allows for the illustrations to have their own adventurous life.
The creativity of Kristi Malakoff cannot be confined to only one medium, though. Over her artistic career, she worked with a great variety of media. Transparent plastic, wallpaper, wire, wood, plastic figurines are among the materials with which the artist realizes micro and macro installations and sculptures. 
All the material chosen become in Malakoff‘s hands the means to give shape to a visual and tactile universe, where a serene grace sets the overall mood.
To see more of Kristi Malakoff art, visit her website.
Images thanks to Kristi Malakoff
Observatory Mansions (Italian Version)
Observatory Mansions 