Material Thinking
Aureole - work in progress. Wet paper pulp on tapestry screen.
They say that you need to have 10,000 hours of “hands in the vat” in order to become a master papermaker. That I will never be because I am not that interested in perfecting the art of creating a perfect piece of paper.
What I am interested in is the materiality of paper, making paper to use for a particular purpose and experimenting with paperpulp.
When I first started making paper, I did indeed “pull” many sheets of paper. It soon became repetitive and somewhat boring. I was more interested in the meditative process and how it stilled my mind having my “hands in the vat”. This led me to researching the sounds made by my hands in the water during the papermaking process which in turn led me to exploring fractals.
As one thing leads to another, these fractals eventually became independent characters who leapt from my paper screen demanding a life of their own. As I kept making these I was drawn to the idea of painting with paper pulp in an abstract rather than figurative or representational way.
Always starting from the proposition of “what if’ I began painting with pulp onto of existing embroideries I found in the opportunity shops. This was limiting as it meant going over the top of another image like painting by numbers. That experiment was shelved…fast forward to another trip to the opportunity shop and a large tapestry kit.
Samplers are always good ways to try out new ideas so I cut the tapestry sheet into four and experimented with colours. I had been making my daily ink artworks about sun sparks so I continued with this colour play with the paper pulps. I liked the samplers and moved onto a large tapestry.
I’m quite happy with the result so far. I love the black lines that show through and I will experiment with stitching on them. Hopefully it will lead into a new direction. I get to paint in a non traditional way, with loads of bright colours and the suggestion of mark making with thread. Who knows where it will take me, but for now, it is enough.
Small paper pulp samplers on tapestry drying on a papermaking screen.
