source: australiaunlimited

Benja Harney never knew his job existed. “No one told me that you could be a paper engineer,” he says, a smile creeping across his face. “I didn’t even know what they were.”

The Sydney artist and designer frames his career, somewhat humbly, as a combination of hard work and serendipity. “I just lucked out in some ways.” Another smile. “I just started and I didn’t even know you could do this for a living… I didn’t see any potential career trajectory in paper.”

Having made his first paper sculpture at 25 while studying graphic design at Enmore TAFE, Harney – who works under the tag of Paperform – has since gone on to become one of Australia’s most prominent and creative paper engineers, with his incredibly intricate, detailed, lifelike paper sculptures, pop-up books, objects and backdrops commissioned by brands, galleries and commercial and editorial clients from around Australia and the world.

Despite the rarity of his craft, Harney has completed a string of advertising projects for companies as diverse as Telstra, Yahoo!, McDonalds, Sportsgirl and MasterCard in recent years, whilst undertaking creative commissions for the likes of Lego, the Sydney Opera House, Topshop, Incu, US department store JCPenney, French fashion house Hermès and its boutique offshoot, Petit h. He’s even engineered pop-up books for the likes of Harper’s Bazaar, cutting-edge Australian fashion label Romance was Born, and Australia’s own princess of pop, Kylie Minogue.

But Harney isn’t so much swayed by the profile of his clients. To put it simply, his work is his passion. “I fetishise over the idea of the forms you can create with paper, rather than the paper itself,” he urges.

“It’s always been like, ‘Wow, how do you do that?’ There’s something about working it out – the mental arithmetic you have to apply to make it function – that I’ve always been drawn to.”

This sense of natural curiosity pervades Harney’s character. Throughout our interview, he asks as many questions as he answers, diving onto Google to speedily reference and research when the conversation takes a turn toward the unfamiliar.

His Sydney studio, hidden away on the second floor of a former factory building in the crowded backstreets of Surry Hills, resembles something between a research laboratory and a kid’s bedroom. A stand of paper pink flamingos, a pair of ice skates and a life-size piano accordion (from Harney’s debut solo exhibition at Object Gallery in 2011) perch atop the shelf above his desk like a row of trophies, competing for space with countless other sculptures, projects and paper collectables. One of the extraordinarily ornate paper wings he fashioned for a Hermès window display hangs gracefully from the ceiling, while tangles of off-cuts, prototypes and works in progress scatter the desk and burst from storage tubs, drawers and nooks.

“This whole thing was really just borne out of the love of making things,” he muses, waving a hand as if to illustrate the point. “From an early age, my brother and I were making a lot of stuff all the time from satay skewers and paper and Lego and models and all different kinds of stuff. I think the paper was a way to make things quite easily. You could create something that was quite cool and interesting quite simply and for not much money.”

That said, Harney’s entrance to his creative field was hardly a smooth one. After growing up in Sydney, he spent his early twenties drifting between jobs in bars and restaurants and “just partying”. “I was very much at sea for many years,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do at all and was kind of lost in a way.” He moved to London, where he would live for two years and, as luck would have it, befriended the director of graphic design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. “He said to me, ‘You’re such a good communicator, you should do graphic design.’”

He moved back to Australia, enrolled at Enmore TAFE and set about studying graphic design. It was there that he was first introduced to the notion of working with paper. Suffice to say, it was a creative boon for the young Harney. “We had a really basic class in paper construction and, well, that was it for me,” he says. He began using paper constructions as illustrative backdrops to catalogue designs, documents and various other graphic design jobs. Harney recalls making early paper sculptures for friends “because it was just something I enjoyed doing” and has clear memories of making his first pop-up books for a fashion designer friend’s collection look-book. “I kind of had a eureka moment where I just worked out in my mind how it would all fit together and work,” he smiles.

Nonetheless, his paper work was little more than a hobby. Soon after graduating college, he got a job as a designer at The Daily Telegraph and went on to work at the Sydney tabloid for the best part of six years, working on his paper sculptures at night and on the weekends.

The commissions began to roll in regardless, with several friends – long impressed by his impossibly intricate and fragile creations – using his skills for photo shoots or marketing jobs. He created a bright pink and orange card featuring a pop-up cake for an advertising campaign for US department store JCPenney via a friend who worked for Australian advertising agency Collider, before another friend, stylist Megan Morton, commissioned him to create a series of paper sets and backdrops for a major photo shoot she was working on.

“It was at that point that I realised that there might be something in this in terms of a job,” he smiles. “The door opened in a way. I started researching and that’s when I realised there was this thing called a ‘paper engineer’ and that it actually existed.”

He describes the beauteously detailed wings he created in 2009 for a Christmas window display for French fashion house Hermès’ Sydney store – which followed on from an elaborate pop-up book for Harper’s Bazaar – as a “watershed moment”, both in terms of realising his potential as an artisan and taking his career to the next level and exposing his work to a truly international client base. “I was crying by the end of them,” he laughs. “That kind of put me on their radar.”

Indeed, the following year, he became the first Australian to be commissioned to create a limited edition design for Petit h, Hermès’ bespoke offshoot, and he travelled to Paris to work within the famed French fashion house. “They gave me access to their vault, which nobody ever gets to see, and it was just incredible,” he says.

Working with master leather craftsmen from the Petit h atelier, he created a pop-up book in leather “that tells a geometric story of the corners of Hermès luggage”.

“It was a great honour,” urges Harney. “I was the first Australian to be asked to go there and it was a fantastic challenge to be working in that environment and interesting to be an Australian in a situation like that – I think different cultures bring different approaches to collaboration… Being overseas and working overseas creatively, there’s a kind of cultural friction that occurs that can be really invigorating.

“I think in France they enjoyed the fact that I was Australian and had that kind of ‘Whatever, it’ll be alright’ attitude,” he laughs. “I’ve always thought that the French find simplicity in complication. They like things to be very complicated, but they like the result to be very simple.”

Although the experience helped establish Harney’s paper creations on a global stage (his work was shown alongside some of world’s leading paper artists as part of the major exhibition Here Today Gone Tomorrow, Life’s Fragile Nature at Chippendale’s NG Art Gallery as part of Art Month Sydney earlier this year), Harney prefers to work in an autonomous and relatively isolated context. Indeed, while he counts Japanese professor and paper master Yoshinobu Miyamoto as major inspiration, he tries to avoid engaging too much with “other people’s stuff”.

“I think it’s really rewarding to just keep on your own track, in a creative sense, to really measure yourself against no one but your own self… A friend once said to me, because we’re so far away in Australia, we’re the most modern place in the world. That’s kind of resonated with me for many years… People kind of bemoan the fact that there is no culture here, but my attitude is, well, let’s make the culture, let’s do it ourselves.”

As humble as he is, Harney isn’t one to lack ambition. He’s come this far and he’s not about to stop.

“My goal is to be the best in the world at what I do,” he states resolutely. “I want to foster the notion of Australian design and take that dedication and our unique viewpoint to the world,” he pauses, drifting off for a moment.

“You know one idea?” he starts off again. “I would love to do a whole box of pop-up Victorian insects,” he pauses again, nodding to himself. “There are just too many ideas and not enough time.”