Talking with my Hands

Pooling (detail) work in progress sandbag sculpture

It’s pretty exciting when I make new work. I approach it from a materials first stance - what are the materials telling me? How do they behave when folded, scrunched, dipped in pulp or torn? How do they ‘speak’ to one another and what is the story they are telling?

These are new works in progress to be included in my exhibition Paper which will open at The Centre, in Beaudesert, Queensland on 9th January.

It’s exciting also because they work together with some older paper artworks I made and exhibited in my joint exhibitions Occupy, held first in Ballina in 2021 and then in Murwillumbah in January 2022. Together these paper narratives are about the human and other than human occupation of landscapes and climate events.

My new works are all about the floods of February 2022, but reference the 2017 floods as well. I have repurposed mud marked papers which survived the 2017 floods and used them to create prints for artist books which talk about floods and pouring rain.

The big surprise to me was using hessian sandbags as not only a source of paper pulp for handmade paper, but also as a way to extend my practice to include paper dipped hessian and 3D sculpture. These proved challenging to devise ways to present them so that the texture becomes a feature of the work.

I then turned to one of my favourite activities and started making a series of artist books. These have been sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks. I ‘talk’ to them with my hands, moving papers around, ripping some up, stitching some together, folding and glueing. For the first time I have also included a ‘scroll’ book made from paper dipped hessian which I printed onto. These are all still works in progress but are shaping up nicely.

I’ll add some more marks to them, perhaps collage on some rusted papers, and then create the text. That’s why I like to give them time to breathe and let the stories come to me in their own time. I’ll be sharing more about the finished artworks and how I resolved some of my other challenges in a future post. Stay tuned…

Three of the artist books in progress.

Two artist books ready for stitching & weaving.