I have made red paper, which is unusual for me.
I was compelled to use red because of my alarm about what is going on in our environment. Trees are being destroyed by wildfire and misuse and I don't know what to do about it. So I make art.
"Alarm"
This is a series about cotton as a crop. In thinking about cotton here I am thinking of slavery, exploitation, greed and the need to talk about this. The threads are made of spun paper.
Black Cotton
Uncertain Ground
Between Steel and Tree
Bound Tree
Ghost Tree
WORKING WITH PAPER
Papermaking is a wet process of transforming plant fibers into the familiar dry, receptive surface. Paper, like many things, is a process before it is a product. My art streams from the process which flows through two conceptual branches.
One branch runs through paper’s origins in nature, and through thoughts about the natural environment within which our lives are embedded. I grow my fiber. The bark of paper mulberry is stripped, the inner bark is cleaned, and then it is cooked, beaten and formed on a screen. Engagement with nature is essential to us all, and even small things, like fibers have big influences. Because of small things with huge environmental importance I have a body of work that was formed, in part, through the activities of insects - honeybees in one case, and red wiggler composting worms in another. The processes of the insects were essential to the final artistic product.
The other branch runs through the pages of human culture. Paper is written on. Paper supports history, stories, musical notation, drawings, art…and has other more mundane uses. In this case the cultural burden resided primarily on my southern grandmother's journal. When I got that journal, it had been shredded, as she wished. I turned the pages back on themselves and they disappeared again into paper pulp. I used the material remains to create art specific to my grandmother. In later work l looked back at that work and at family as a process of cultural inheritance moving forward to influence our present. I reworked some of the old pieces and pressed forward with new work looking at current racial issues entangled in my own southern heritage.
These two conceptual branches flow together somewhere between the hard realities of natural disaster and the disastrous realities of white supremacy - the latter because of the implications of race related to my own present, and the former because no matter how peaceful and cyclical the process of paper making may be, we, as humans, are slamming headlong into a confrontation with the cycles of nature.
