Communities of Colour

Inspired by the colours of the earth and tree bark ~ making paste papers

I’ve been asked to be in a paper exhibition in Melbourne. I’m very excited by this prospect as it is going to be a group exhibition with some well known papermakers from all over Australia.

It was a bit daunting thinking about what I would like to put in the exhibition as I have so many works that have never been exhibited or shown only once. So it was a great opportunity to go through my archive of paper artworks to select a number of works that ‘speak’ to each other.

I am also keen to make new work as well, especially about the subject I am most interested in at the moment and that is forests and trees. I made a series of three forest works when I did my artist residency at Big Ci , Bilpin in the Blue Mountains in 2021.

Originally the residency started in March 2020 only a few months after the devastating 2019/2020 bushfires. You could see all the blackened trees, burnt fences and building damage driving into Bilpin. The trees had started putting out their first orange leafed foliage after the fires. I learnt that these first leaves were poisonous to native animals, a way to protect the young shoots from getting nibbled at.

Yet within a week all the artists at the residency had to leave because of the pandemic. I didn’t return until a year later, making work about the lockdown experience as well as about the trees which had survived. I loved this new process of creating large (for me) poured paper paintings on a silk screen frame. The paper dried on the screen and peeled off easily.

My first attempts were of individual tree trunks which I assembled together on the magnetic studio walls. I really liked that playful way of creating, a bit like moving felt shapes on a ‘fuzzy felt’ board when I was young.

This week I ‘unearthed’ this tree assemblage that I brought back from Bilpin and thought that I would love to do something like this again, even if it was just to trial ideas for a collage. I also wanted to try out creating paste papers like Mark Hearld does in his book Raucous Invention.

I had all the white papers laid out on the studio bench ready to start creating, but my mind was full of the terrible news stories from Palestine. I had just finished titling the five postcards I had made for a postcard project to raise funds for PARA, Palestine Australia Relief and Action and I was having trouble staying focused on sending out joyful thoughts.

I brought out my paints, selecting browns, reds and ochres, the colours of the earth. As I mixed them with the corn starch paste and layered them onto the paper, my mind started to settle into the process. I became calmer and started to dream again of trees, whole forests and communities of trees.

It had me thinking about people, how people need other people. We are tribal by nature, first born into a family, then a community and a country. All the same, living on the blessings of what the earth provides.

These striated earthy colours became the bark of trees, each hue and shade a skin of the tree, all trees in a forest. Like humans, all hues and shapes in a community. When assembled together we are all connected. I’m looking forward to collaging the different coloured paste papers to see what new shapes and forms they will create as a community of trees.

After the Fires - poured paper pulp assemblage exhibited at BigCi Open Day, 2021