I was fortunate enough to get a work study scholarship for this six week workshop, making it all possible, if exhausting, I’m very thankful.
Apart from my brief dabbling at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) and periodic light assisting, this was my first substantial introduction to hand papermaking.
Amy Jacobs is the senior director of artistic projects, and one of two master collaborators at Dieu Donné, a Brooklyn based nonprofit working with established and emerging artists to facilitate their use of handmade paper. The class’ structure was designed to elaborate upon Dieu Donné’s collaborative model, helping each of us arrive at materials and processes that would synergize with our broader creative practices. This was largely possible because we were a charmed class of six, two of whom were studio assistants. The group was highly illustrative of the many access points and relevant applications there are for hand papermaking across disciplines. We had a textile artist, a painter, a clay and paper artist, a metal sculptor, and two printmakers. These backgrounds translated to very different approaches and outcomes.
As a printmaker, my impulse to work in multiples led me to make large editions. I’ve always enjoyed production and repetition as strategies for internalizing new information and ensuring consistency in my printed work. In the context of a new medium it helped me track and elaborate upon new chance discoveries found in the process of making other more intentional series.
Throughout the first weeks, I took a keen interest in our group fiber testing; preparing linen, flax, jute, cotton, and abaca in a Hollander beater (a macerating machine used to produce pulp) and drawing off a quart every hour to make test sheets for later comparison. Lightly beaten fibers have very different qualities of translucency and shrinkage than overbeaten fibers when examined as finished sheets, and I was interested in tracking their gradual transformation. Testing different combinations of fiber and degrees of processing was also valuable, as it can produce effects like waving and cockling from the tension generated by different rates of drying. There are so many other variables: sizing, pigmentation, surface dying and treatments (like wax and graphite), stack drying or air drying… too many to recount or methodically explore.
It took me a few weeks of totally immersive full time making to access a freer, more exploratory state. A state divested from commercial outcomes or anxious internal voices urging the maximization of time and studio access. I eventually arrived in a space of coalescing production and fatigue, which gave way to an almost passive state of receptivity. We were all living and breathing paper, and things just started happening. That “happening” became the subject of the two main projects I took on in the last few weeks of the workshop. In the first, I designed a stencil based on a tangle of bast fiber that would connect across four panels. I was surrounded by fiber in all forms, and wanted to make it the illustrated subject adorning its own anonymous substrate. I experimented with the design (overlayed in cotton) on base sheets of several different fibers, one of which was overbeaten raw abaca which dried very translucent. Arranging them later on the wall I found overlaying the translucent abaca pieces over the more opaque and contrasting flax revealed the potential for a repeat pattern which I then explored in a larger series using that same stencil. I used the leftover pulps from fiber testing mixed together in shifting ratios for the base sheets.
The second project came out of a joint exercise in pulp pigmentation and stenciling. I had initially designed a stencil after a favorite sea rock in California, but ended up being more interested in the discarded pile of shapes, the negative spaces, shadows, and rock contours, the parts of a carving I would normally lose in my relief printing process. I had just heard a lecture by Clarence Morgan, who was teaching in the drawing and painting studio, where he talked about creating “alphabets” or “libraries” of forms to draw from. He had physicalized these drawn shapes as CNC routed wooden objects he was then able to trace and layer in his drawings. I realized I had created just such an alphabet of deliberate yet unconscious forms, a library of shadows. Working intuitively, I made an array of different brightly pigmented sheets, placing the stenciled shapes on top of each to do the blowouts. I offset the blowouts directly from the mold onto felt interfacing and partially pressed them to use as wet collage elements. I then applied them to prepared basesheets pigmented to the original hue of the rock shadows. Arranging the forms was a meditative act which felt at times like divination, at others like an arbitrary board game with no rules. When the pieces dried, the pigments presented duskier and more powdery than before, so I decided to try resuscitating them with a brushing on and ironing in of beeswax. This treatment enriched the colors beautifully.
My last undertaking was a series of unstenciled and much looser blowouts created with successive passes of the hose. These pieces were imagined as the underlying substrate for a future print, but changed in the making as I discovered different almost brush like effects I could achieve with the hose. This series got me interested in variable editioning and the possibility of making prints that interact dynamically with the features of the handmade paper. I’ve been mulling this over in relation to the typesetting and engraving work I was doing in Wisconsin last winter, imagining movable alphabets of crabs and tadpoles which could be arranged around various crests and hollows of their underlying sheets. These individual panels would then form a larger and more spontaneous pattern when curated together.
Papermaking facilitates so many mergers among pre-existing mediums and processes. I’m excited to continue to engage with it and allow it to show me unimagined future works.
As part of my quest for total immersion, I did a lot of reading from the studio library and have been truly impressed with the range and quality of scholarship being done to illuminate and extend the field of hand papermaking. I’ll drop a few favorites below for those interested.