PAPER VIVANT || Giving Reclaimed Paper a New Life as Sculpture
Cardboard has a short career in most households: a few weeks as packaging, then a spot beside the recycling bin, until Maya River gives it a second life as sculpture.
River is the Vancouver artist behind Paper Vivant, a sculptural practice built on reclaimed paper. She mixes everyday paper and cardboard with natural binders to make a paste, then shapes it into vessels, wall forms, and organic objects that read more as artifacts than as paper. At this year’s Interior Design Show (IDS) Vancouver, held September 24 to 27, 2026, her exhibit made that case in earthen tones, ridged surfaces and silhouettes that looked recently unearthed.
The exhibit was arranged to give each piece room to breathe. Pedestals carried a conical form folded like a seashell and a vessel studded with rows of pointed ridges, while a coiled basket of layered paper ropes sat on a red shag rug, gray-green leaves rising from its center. The restrained, earthen palette kept attention on texture, and the texture rewarded a closer look.
Her route to sculpture ran through business project management. River began making more than four years ago, and a personal creative decision has since grown into a studio practice with commissions, a downloadable catalogue, and relationships with interior designers in several countries.
Technique gives each piece its character. For most of her work, River uses a simple mould to form individual components, then joins them together. Moulds let her build forms from repeatable parts, while freehand shaping lets each coil follow the hand. Her favourite piece, the large coiled wall relief with an eye-like spiral nestled at its center, came from something newer: a free-form hand-shaping technique she describes as a discovery that excited her. Layered coils wind inward toward a patterned core, each one shaped freehand.
River, of Persian heritage, calls her pieces fossils from the future: objects that feel like ancient artifacts, with an otherworldly form and an earthy touch. Nature supplies the rest, from the sea and its creatures to tree roots. As a child in her father’s vineyard, she was fascinated by vine roots, part of them above ground and part below, and by how they connected to the vineyard; the entwined coils of the wall relief echo that fascination.
Paper Vivant is built to travel. River takes commissions for larger residential and commercial projects, and the full catalogue can be downloaded from the Paper Vivant website. Studio visits in Vancouver are by appointment, and she works with collectors and design professionals in Canada and internationally. She started on Etsy, where she reports more than 500 sales over four years, and has since worked with interior designers in Australia, Europe and North America, with Japan a recent addition. “I love to see my work in homes all around the world,” she says.
Her website describes each piece as sitting somewhere between artifact, organism and imagined relic, exploring transformation, memory and our connection to the natural world. Her stated aim is to bring texture, warmth and a quiet sense of presence into the spaces the work inhabits. For designers and collectors seeking sculptural objects with an eco-conscious story, River shows how far reclaimed material can go.
At Paper Vivant, the first life of a material is only the first draft.
Photography by Florence Leung
