Next week I’ll be giving an artist talk as part of my Paper exhibition**. It’s going to be not only about my creative process but will be a conversation between two papermakers, myself and Zela Bissett. We both share a love of this material and it will be an interesting back and forth discussion about how we use our handmade papers to express a theme or place.

I’ve started to order my thoughts in readiness for the talk, thinking about my relationship with this material and how it all started. I’ve been working primarily with paper as my medium for the past 10 + years.

I started TAFE doing darkroom photography but quickly discovered a love for printmaking. There is something magical about both processes, as it’s all about seeing an image forming, either in the darkroom developer tray or rolled through the etching press.

When I added papermaking and artist book making into to the mix, I felt I had found my medium(s). I started papermaking in earnest in 2010 when I moved from TAFE to university. This began a whole new adventure. I first made paper from recycled clothing and then paper from plant fibres. After graduating, three of us university graduates were gifted a papermaking beater – called a Hollander – from a local papermaker. He taught us the process of making beautiful paper from banana plant fibre.

Oh the joy of discovering what banana paper could do and how it could crinkle and dry thin on a screen in the eastern manner of papermaking, which uses a mould, but not a deckle. The paper is “restraint dried” on the screen which allows it to be super thin. Learning to work with this plant through all the pre-paper making processes of chopping, cooking, washing and beating, was an experience I found incredibly labour intensive but so satisfying. The actual papermaking itself was meditative: swirling hands in the vat, pulling the mould through the fibrous water then out with a wet sheet ready to dry in the sun.

I spent many years doing this until our outside cooker broke down and then I switched to recycled clothing again using mostly cotton or linen fabrics.  One thing that makes paper special is you can embed a sense of place in its very making. Paper is really only water and fibre, but you can add elements into it, like beach grass or seaweed, half beaten threads from clothing that carry with them the essence of the wearer.

The paper becomes an active ingredient in the story, or theme of the work. When I made work about the desert, I used desert plants and clay from the salt pans. When I wanted to create work about the floods, I made paper from sandbags used to protect our home from flooding.

So as I order my thoughts, I think forward to the conversations we will be having ; about the works we have made and the stories they carry, about the paper itself and the elements used in its creation, of our thought processes as we interact with our materials. It will be an interesting talk, I’m looking forward to it!

**Artist Talk for the Paper exhibition is on Saturday 4th February 2023 at 11am QLD time at The Centre, Beaudesert, QLD..