In addition to the main directions of her œuvre, the 'folded stories', Lavater has always taken new paths and experimented with both medium and content. Thus, in the course of her artistic career, she has repeatedly set new accents, tried out new things, and further developed herself and her art over the decades. Nevertheless, she has remained true to her basic artistic investigation within the framework of the sign and the deliverance and, in this sense, has constantly re-examined these basic elements from many sides.
Important to her were the artist's view of our society, as well as philosophical and socio-political issues. Thus, she created paintings on canvas with glued-on shoelaces and newspaper clippings, pictograms printed on paper (Nives Publishing House) or films in which their forms take on movement (Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) of the Centre Pompidou). She also created a pictogram alphabet with which to write poetry. Small wall sculptures with witty motifs were also part of her inventory.
Her books were also used as educational teaching tools for children, who could continue to draw these stories and also make up their own stories.
Paper Art
In the early 1970s, Lavater began experimenting with handmade paper. The work "Dialogue," for example, was created as a project for the first paper biennial at the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren in 1986. Warja Lavater formed the sculptures out of paper pulp; she visited François Lafranca's paper mill near Locarno for this purpose. With "Dialogue" Lavater opened up a new artistic medium, namely that of paper art, and yet she remained conceptually faithful to her artist books. She added holes and tears to the sheets of paper, which look like opened oversized book spines, and partially dyed them black. She called this and other Paper Art works "livres sculptés."
