A roll of paper was sealed in a jar and buried under a Buddhist shrine near the northern Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Two thousand years later, and it’s made its way to the United States and the Library of Congress in a Parker Pen box. Of course you’re going to want to know what it says, but ‘fragile’ doesn’t begin to cover it.
How the Library of Congress unrolled a 2,000-year-old Buddhist scroll – Atlas Obscura
The actual unrolling happened in June, 2006, on a Saturday, to reduce the risk of air currents created by coworkers and better control the humidity and temperature of the library’s paper lab. Krueger was present with only two others: Yasmeen Khan, a senior rare book conservator at the library, and Mark Barnard, the chief conservator at the British Library. “One cannot underestimate the nerves of steel required for such a project,” Krueger says. “We had only one chance for success.”
“The paper cut sculptures explore the probable and magical transformation of the flat sheet of paper into figures that expand into the space surrounding them. The negative and absent 2 dimensional space left by the cut, points out the contrast to the 3 dimensional reality it creates, even though the figures still stick to their origin without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in many of the cuts.”