The Scissors as Instrument: Cut and Separate

A pair of scissors is an ordinary object until an artist places it under sustained attention. Held in the hand, it becomes a device for dividing surfaces, interrupting images and giving time a visible edge. The blades do not simply remove material. They establish a relationship between pressure, movement and resistance, turning a familiar household tool into an instrument of thought.

In Alexandra Mawimbi’s visual world, the act of cutting can be understood as a way of approaching representation, mourning and living presence. A cut creates absence, yet it can also reveal what was hidden behind a surface. Across sculpture, two-dimensional work, video, performance, sound and installation, separation becomes a physical action with emotional and social consequences.

The Familiar Tool Becomes Strange

Scissors carry the memory of everyday use. They belong to sewing baskets, school pencil cases, kitchens, studios and office drawers. Their shape is recognised immediately: two blades, a central pivot and handles designed for the hand. This familiarity gives the object a quiet authority. When it appears in an artwork, viewers bring personal associations with fabric, paper, grooming, repair and domestic labour.

The artist can disturb that recognition by enlarging the scissors, isolating them, suspending them or presenting them beside a material they cannot easily cut. A small pair may look precise and intimate; an oversized pair may suggest machinery, threat or institutional control. The tool’s meaning shifts according to scale, placement and the action implied by its position.

This transformation is especially effective in a minimalist presentation. When surrounding detail is reduced, the scissor can hold the centre of attention without explanation. Its metal surface, blunt point, worn handle or open blades become visual evidence. The viewer begins to read the object through posture and tension rather than through its practical purpose.

Cutting As A Physical Language

Cutting is a form of drawing in space. Each closing of the blades marks a line, but the line is produced through removal rather than addition. Paper parts, cloth loosens and an image is divided into sections. The action is direct, yet its result may be delicate. A clean incision can appear controlled, while a rough tear around the cut records hesitation, force or changing intention.

The sound of scissors can extend this language. A repeated snip creates a rhythm that may be recorded, performed or used within an installation. In video, the movement of the hand can make the audience aware of duration: one cut takes a moment, while a large accumulation of cuts can suggest labour, ritual or endurance. Sound gives separation a temporal dimension, allowing the audience to experience it rather than simply observe its result.

Performance brings the body into the centre of the work. The hand must coordinate sight, grip and pressure. The wrist turns; the elbow adjusts; the material moves in response. Even when the artist’s body is absent from the final image, the cut preserves the trace of an encounter between body and surface. It can communicate care, aggression, precision or fatigue without relying on spoken language.

What The Cut Leaves Behind

Every cut produces fragments. These pieces may be discarded, collected, rearranged or returned to the artwork in another form. The leftover material is never neutral. It can resemble evidence, skin, memory, a broken document or the remains of a former whole. By keeping the fragments visible, an artist prevents separation from becoming a clean or final event.

Collage makes this process particularly clear. A photograph sliced into sections can be reassembled with gaps, overlaps or reversed orientations. The original image remains present, but its authority has been weakened. Faces, bodies and places become unstable. The viewer is invited to consider who controls an image, what it conceals and what a representation cannot contain.

The gap itself may become the subject. White space, darkness or an empty support can carry the emotional weight of the missing section. In works concerned with mourning, absence does not need to be illustrated through a symbolic object. It can be built into the structure of the work. The missing part becomes active, asking the eye to move around it and the mind to imagine what cannot be recovered.

Separation, Repair And Living Presence

Cutting is often associated with damage, yet an incision can also begin a process of repair. In textile practice, fabric is cut before it is sewn, folded or reshaped. In sculpture, a divided form may be joined with wire, thread, staples or visible seams. The repair does not erase the break. Instead, it makes the history of the break readable.

This distinction matters when an artwork addresses mourning. Grief is not a simple subtraction in which a life disappears and the remaining world returns to its previous state. It changes the way objects, rooms and images are encountered. A cut surface can hold that altered perception: the material remains, but its continuity has been interrupted.

Living presence works through a related tension. A body may be represented by an outline, a sound, a gesture or an object that has been handled. The body is not fully shown, yet it remains perceptible through traces. Scissors can assist this partial appearance by removing identifying details, dividing a portrait or opening a concealed layer. What is withheld can become as expressive as what is visible.

The work can therefore move between vulnerability and agency. A cut may expose a subject to scrutiny, but it may also interrupt the expectation that the subject must be completely available. Separation becomes a form of control over visibility. It can refuse a fixed image and make room for complexity, privacy or change.

Australian Materials And Conditions

In Australia, the scissors occupy a particularly broad field of domestic and working associations. They appear in school craft activities, op-shop alterations, gardening sheds, sewing rooms and the practical routines of moving house. The distances between Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and regional communities also shape how materials circulate. An artist may source fabric from a local market, salvage packaging from a suburban business or receive components through Australia Post from another state.

The local art economy gives these ordinary materials different pressures. Artist-run spaces, public galleries and commercial galleries operate alongside independent studios and regional exhibition programs. In Sydney and Melbourne, a work may be viewed within a dense network of contemporary art institutions; in smaller cities or remote areas, transport, storage and installation time can become central parts of the artwork’s life. A fragile cut paper piece may require a very different strategy from a steel sculpture travelling across the country.

Making with sharp tools also brings practical responsibilities. Australian artists working in shared studios, teaching spaces or public programs need to consider workplace safety requirements, risk assessment, ventilation and secure storage. The national framework supported by Safe Work Australia and the relevant state or territory regulators makes the scissor a useful reminder that material practice is embodied and regulated. The tool may be simple, but its use involves hands, surfaces, audiences and working conditions.

Intellectual property is another form of separation. Under Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, the use of photographs, printed matter, film stills or text can raise questions about permission, reproduction and adaptation. Moral rights may also matter when an artist transforms an existing image or presents a work in a context that changes its meaning. Cutting an image does not automatically remove its cultural or legal history. The altered fragment still belongs to a network of authorship and responsibility.

These questions can be approached through careful material choices. Reclaimed cloth, discarded paper and commercially printed images carry different histories, while locally sourced objects may connect an installation to a particular neighbourhood. The Australian habit of repairing, reusing and repurposing household goods can become more than an aesthetic reference. It can place the artwork within real economies of care, waste and resourcefulness.

The Scissor In The Digital Archive

The physical cut has a strong relationship with digital editing. A video can be cut into shots; a sound recording can be separated into tracks; an image can be cropped, masked or layered. Digital tools make division appear instantaneous, but the logic remains familiar. Something is selected, something is excluded and a sequence is created from the remainder.

An artist’s website extends this process of selection. A portfolio does not contain an entire practice at once. It presents chosen works, documentation, exhibition histories, biographical information and contact points. The interface becomes a quiet instrument for arranging attention. Images may be opened one at a time, while video, performance and sound ask the visitor to spend time with forms that cannot be reduced to a single still.

This digital environment also places art beside other kinds of online material. A curated archive may lead to a story about online entertainment or consumer culture, such as this new player review, where the language of selection, risk and interface operates in a different register. The connection is useful because it shows how screens organise behaviour: one platform asks for sustained looking, another directs clicking, comparison and decision-making.

The distinction between these experiences depends on pace and intention. A portfolio can create pauses, blank areas and carefully ordered encounters. The visitor may notice the texture of a surface, return to a previous work or compare a sculptural form with its documentation. The screen does not remove the cut; it translates it into navigation, cropping, sequencing and absence.

Documentation is therefore part of the artwork’s afterlife. A performance survives through still images, a sound work through a recording and an installation through views that cannot capture its full scale. Each document separates the work from its original conditions while giving it another form of presence. The archive does not restore the event. It keeps a trace available for renewed attention.

Toward An Ethics Of Division

The scissors can be read as an instrument of clarity, but clarity is never innocent. To cut is to decide where one thing ends and another begins. That decision may expose a structure that was difficult to see, or it may impose a boundary where continuity mattered. The artwork can hold both possibilities without resolving them.

This is why the simple action has such expressive force. A scissor can divide a photograph, release a body from a background, open a sealed envelope or reduce a large material into fragments. Each use changes the relationship between surface and depth, whole and part, presence and absence. The tool carries practical knowledge, emotional memory and social history into the studio.

Within a broader practice, cut and separate can become recurring methods rather than fixed symbols. Sculpture gives the division weight; two-dimensional work gives it an edge; video reveals its duration; performance makes its physical demands visible; sound turns it into rhythm; installation places the separated elements in relation to a room and to one another.

The strongest work may leave the viewer between destruction and repair. A fragment can be a loss, a clue or the beginning of a new arrangement. A gap can signal mourning, protection or possibility. The scissors remain open to these interpretations because they are grounded in an action everyone recognises, yet capable of producing meanings that ordinary use cannot contain.

Explore Alexandra Mawimbi’s portfolio as a space where material decisions, bodily gestures and carefully preserved traces meet. Move slowly through the works, attend to what has been removed as closely as what remains, and let each separation reveal another way of seeing presence.