Beyond the Box showcases Australian artists using cardboard to create art

13 hours agoSun 9 Nov 2025 at 7:02pm

Gabrielle Bates says she wants to change public perception of the humble material cardboard as an artists’ medium. (Supplied: Ben Rak)

You’ve heard of artists thinking outside the box, but what about artists using the box itself?

That’s the concept behind Beyond the Box, a new exhibition at Manly Art Gallery & Museum, which brings together six artists working with the humble medium of cardboard.

“It’s a material that we encounter every day; it’s temporary, disposable, and often overlooked,” Sydney-based artist Patrizia Biondi says.

“By working with it in a fine art context, I am interested in challenging perceptions of value and permanence.”

Used cardboard gets a new life

Biondi uses salvaged cardboard and other unwanted items, such as packaging and pipes, in her work.

She cleans her pre-loved cardboard and treats it with an antifungal spray before making it into brightly coloured and multi-layered sculptures.

Patrizia Biondi uses salvaged cardboard and other items in artworks like Mexican Milk Norfolk Fresco. (Supplied)

She often collects material on council collection days and searches out pieces with unusual textures or eye-catching designs that serve as a reminder of the material’s previous use.

“It’s an interesting process because collecting and sorting it almost becomes an archaeological activity,” she says.

At one stage, she had a massive stockpile of used cardboard at her home.

“The material becomes, in itself, something that drives you. Just looking and sorting through [it], even in your studio, can be amazing.

“But my husband and I agreed that I would not collect any more cardboard until I used it all up,” she says, with a laugh.

While many of us use great quantities of cardboard in our day-to-day life, Biondi says it’s easy not to think about where it comes from or its environmental impact.

“It carries the traces of global commerce because it is literally the packaging of all our consumption,” she says.

“By re-contextualising it as art, I want to give it a second life and invite reflection on cycles of use, waste and transformation and reveal how these systems shape both ecological impact and artistic practice.”

Collaborating with cardboard

Gabrielle Bates, an artist based in the small Central Tablelands town of Kandos, used to make sculptures from stainless steel.

But she grew tired of lugging around and storing her works, some of which weighed up to 2 tonnes.

Now, she makes much lighter mixed-media pieces from salvaged cardboard, which allows her to create work without any negative environmental impact.

Bates carves, paints, punctures, shapes and arranges the used cardboard into new assemblages that convey a sense of movement, sometimes evoking a flock of birds or school of fish.

Gabrielle Bates uses cardboard, like in this work titled Murmuration, to evoke motion in nature. (Supplied: Gabrielle Bates)

She sees the cardboard as a collaborator rather than a passive material.

“I am very interested in the agency of material and the living quality of all things,” she says.

“Instead of approaching my work as something that can be manipulated by me, I like to think of it as me being of service to it.”

Bates says the biggest challenge in working with cardboard is that people often have a “class consciousness” around the mass-produced material.

“In the art world, whatever that is, there is a perception that quality only fits within a premium type of material,” she explains.

She has found some people are flummoxed by her choice of material.

“They see my work and they’re drawn to it, then they discover it’s cardboard, and that’s often a repellent [for them], but I think that’s good in a way.”

A hidden history of cardboard in art

Bates and Biondi have been making art for decades, but both say this is the first time they have been part of an all-cardboard exhibition.

Beyond the Box curator Ben Rak says while we may not immediately associate cardboard with gallery spaces, artists have been using it for at least a century.

Patrizia Biondi’s Unearthed Silence retains some of the features of the recycled materials used to create it. (Supplied: Manly Art Gallery & Museum)

“Picasso used it for collage works and for his guitar pieces in 1913, and since then it’s featured in different art movements and in the practices of artists interested in disrupting the idea of hierarchy in art materials,” he says.

Rak says cardboard was popular in the Arte Povera (“poor art”) movement in Italy in the 60s and 70s, where artists incorporated found objects in their work to challenge the institutions of the day.

“If we think of, say oil painting, as the top of the peak, the artists wanted to flip that idea on its head and chose everyday materials like cardboard.”

“Into the 2000s, you see conceptual artists work with it in a lot of different forms in sculpture and painting to engage with the re-use of material and the ideas that come along with that.”

Rak says the exhibition highlights the versatility and potential of cardboard as an artistic material.

“I wanted to have a range of concepts that the cardboard was being used to present, and I wanted the works to be aesthetically different from each other.”

Beauty in the ordinary

Biondi hopes people will “see beauty in the ordinary” at Beyond the Box and reflect on the people, places, and objects we often deem insignificant.

“By elevating a material as unassuming as cardboard, I’m thinking about how perception can shape empathy.

“The simple act of noticing can become an ethical gesture.

“If the work prompts someone to look differently at the materials that surround them, to see value in what is discarded, then I feel a layer of my job is done, because art for me is about expanding our capacity to notice.”

Beyond the Box** is at Manly Art Gallery & Museum until November 30.**