Intriguing Paper Insects by Dorothea Mannes

Dorothea Mannes will exhibit intriguing small sculptures, primarily of winged insects, at Galerie Zône in Leiden in August 2025. She uses book pages for these.

Mannes is a German artist currently living in Leiderdorp. She studied stage and costume design in Offenbach from 1984 to 1990. In China, where she worked for twenty years before moving to the Netherlands at the end of 2019, she was regularly involved in theater projects, events, and workshops.

In 2005, Dorothea Mannes first used book pages for costumes, taken from a box of older books that were about to be discarded by the library. Realizing the potential of this material, she developed a passion for creating fragile animal sculptures. Using books as creative materials and recycling them into art objects and installations is what Dorothea Mannes does. Her design inspiration is drawn from nature, but her goal is not to create perfect likenesses. It is the book that determines the final result. The basis of all her delicate works is an old, unwanted secondhand book from which, by cutting, piercing, tearing, sewing, burning, and gluing, butterflies and other creatures literally emerge.