Roots

ROOTS 

Paper Circle  Nelsonville, Ohio  Mar./Apr. 2016

Plants take center stage as I explore cultural roots and dig into the organic nature of life.

As a papermaker I always enjoy using fibers from a plant I have harvested myself.  Its proximity to the soils I stand on offers special resonance. I was offered an opportunity to make paper from an okra crop on my neighbor’s farm in North Carolina and I spent lovely hours harvesting.

The okra plant itself has a quirky resonance with my own family roots in South Carolina. When I first learned how to make paper years ago, I embedded an okra root in a paper artwork. I called it “a root for my grandmother” because she had told her daughter, my mother, that in moving all over the place the way Army dependents do, she was raising rootless children.  At the time I made the work I was being a little flippant. But some underlying reverence led me to treasure this gestural paper for years.  I do still wonder what makes good roots?

Paper is a loaded medium, I think of books, literature, and art, but paper also references ordinary cultural objects like cardboard and toilet paper and so much more. I love the metaphorical richness of paper. My passion for papermaking is intimately connected to plants and natural processes, and to paper’s role as a medium of human expression.

This exhibit is a ‘sketchbook’, prompted by an exploration of okra fiber and a renewed focus on my own generational roots in the South. I wonder what makes strong cultural roots. In this age of migration, how do people care for their cultural nourishment? 

'A Root for My Grandmother

Okra as a formation aid.

In Japanese tradition methods of papermaking
a substance is added to the vat to slow down drainage.  The papermaker has time to form a
smooth and evenly dispersed sheet of paper,
hence the term 'formation aid'.

Formation aid is traditionally made from the
root of a plant called taroro aoi. It's Latin name
is Abelmoschus manihot, in the mallow family,
Malvaceae.  It is closely related to our familiar
okra, Abelmoschus esculentus.

The tendency of okra to be viscous and slippery can also be used to good effect in forming a sheet of paper. Here I have soaked some frozen okra and am squeezing the thickened water into my vat. The wet sheet on the screen is made of okra fiber.

 'A Butterfly Effect'

Okra root, thread, and paper.


A butterfly effect in physics is a phenomenon
where a small variation in one area of a complex system can have larger effects elsewhere.
The title for this piece happened for the simple reason that the root that is painted black hangs from a butterfly clip.

In 'A Butterfly Effect'  I have used paper as a personal anchor, tenuous as that might be. 
It is a fragile, suspended moment like my feeling of rootlessness. The one floating page was made of pulped journals.  The other has a curved line of journal text emerging from an ink blot.  Inked threads spill from a brush visually connecting the two.

The larger effects within a complex world are still playing out.