Fibre and water, swirling around in a tub. I love that tactile sensation of having my hands in a vat of paper pulp, pulling a sheet and listening to the sounds of water draining. Its a full sensory immersion. Rhythmic and repetitive.
I’m not one for creating multitudes of perfect paper sheets however. I get bored after creating a dozen or so. What I do like to do is paper pulp painting. I’ve had my hands in the paper vat this last month experimenting with all the different ways that paper paintings can be made.
I’ve made big paintings on a metre long silkscreen, which requires a lot of pulp, and small A3 size paintings which seem like a breeze in comparison to the ones on the silkscreen. They’ve all been about trees. I have to say I’m a bit obsessed with the shapes and forms of trees, their canopies with the blue sky peeking through creating a halo effect.
The most ambitious painting I’ve made so far was based on a photo I took on the coastal path near Tootgarook during my artist residency there last year. I made several cyanotype prints of it and then took that image and free form painted it onto the silkscreen with grey, green, blue and white paper pulp. I used kozo fibres mixed in with beaten cottons, but I could tell that there were lots of holes in the leaves against the sky.
When it was dry I carefully took it off the screen but the the result was very holey making the paper fragile to handle. I then tried something I’ve never done before. I created a thick pulp of white cotton and carefully placed the painting onto the wet pulp on the silk screen. The painting became wet very quickly and sunk into the white cotton backing. It looked like the two sheets would naturally meld together. And they did!
I had to do a few little repairs to the backing sheet but I am very happy with the result. It will join other paper pulp tree paintings I’ve done for an exhibition in Upwey, Victoria in May. I’m going down for the exhibition opening and it will be great to see my paper paintings on a gallery wall, finally.
Sky and Moonah tree canopy patterns, Tootgarook
Canopy wet pulp on the silkscreen (detail)