Danish Design × Storytelling × Visual Art
- Christine Mukakasa
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Did you know Hans Christian Andersen, the man who gave the world The Little Mermaid and The Snow Queen, was also a visual artist who cut entire worlds from paper while telling his stories aloud?
"From Andersen's shears - the fairytale appears." Hans Christian Andersen, in his own words
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) gave the world The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, Thumbelina, and The Ugly Duckling. But he left another body of work that almost nobody talks about, one that may be even more astonishing than the stories themselves.
Andersen made papercuts his entire life, and he did so in the most theatrical way possible. When telling a fairytale to a group of children, he would pick up a heavy pair of scissors, large, clumsy things, entirely wrong for the delicacy of what he was about to do - and begin cutting into folded paper as he spoke. The story unfolded in words, and the paper unfolded in form simultaneously. By the time he reached the final sentence, the cutting was complete. Then, slowly and carefully, he would open the folded paper, and the story would be revealed in full, as a single, connected, intricate form. The cut was not an illustration of the fairytale. It was the fairytale.
He was so aware of this duality that he wrote it down himself: "From Andersen's shears — the fairytale appears." A man who knew exactly what he was doing, and wanted you to know it too.
The papercuts that survive are extraordinary objects. Look closely, and you will find him - Hans Christian Andersen himself - hidden inside some of the cuts. A self-portrait encoded into the negative space. A storyteller who put himself into the story, as all the best ones do.
Several of the images here are pages from the picture book of Astrid Stampe, dated 1853, one of the closest people in Andersen's life, the daughter of the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen's closest friend.
The pages show his papercuts glued down in seemingly casual arrangements that are, on closer inspection, deeply considered compositions. Figures and foliage and silhouettes scattered across the page like a mood board, each one a fragment of a larger imaginative world. They feel astonishingly contemporary, like the working pages of a graphic designer, or the research board of a creative director, or the sketchbook of a brand in the process of finding its visual language.
Which is precisely why this research matters to the work I do.
The picture is from the clipping pages from Astrid Stampe's picture book 1853
The MUKAKASA fun iconography pattern experiment, the bold, graphic motif set that runs through the brand's visual identity, begins in the same spirit as Andersen's cuts. Bold silhouette. Figure and nature in conversation. The apparently simple form that contains, on closer reading, a great deal more than it first reveals. A visual language that belongs to no single tradition but draws from many - African iconography, Scandinavian craft, the storyteller's instinct that a figure cut from paper or pressed into clay can hold an entire world.
The AfriScandiStyle research practice is built on exactly these connections: the moments when two creative traditions, separated by centuries and continents, turn out to be saying the same thing.
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