Material and Metaphor -2008 exhibit

Outside the window came inside the room.

Invasive Autumn Olive and Papermaking (2012)

Two passions converge - my papermaking studio and the health of the surrounding woods.

Elaeagnus, or Autumn Olive, is a shrub, like Privet, that was introduced to serve a purpose. Privet hedges make great privacy borders. Autumn Olive has a sweet scented spring bloom. But when the gardeners leave and their houses disappear, these shrubs do not.  They are vigorous in my part of North Carolina and they shade out the young trees that would otherwise renew the pine and mixed hardwood forest that is so beautiful and rich.

Along my driveway in very early spring --  On the right, a beech tree, with last year's leaves not yet pushed off by new growth or a gusty wind; pines, providing some high level green among the still bare limbs of the sweet gum, poplar, oaks, hickory, sassafras, maples, sourwood, and so many more; and on the left half of the picture is a thick cluster of shrubs just leafing out, getting a head start on soaking up the sunlight.  On the edge of the woods, in the foreground, is a small, but growing, pile of sticks - some of the straighter, medium sized branches of newly dug up elaeagnus.

Since the task of clearing the woods of invasives is arduous and ongoing, I spent a few days processing the bark fiber from the autumn olive to see what kind of paper it might make.  I will confess that the process of making paper from these twigs is also arduous....

Labors of love ..... paper... and these woods...

Collect, cut, boil.... strip bark, clean bark... and get it ready to cook again. 

The stripping... the scraping....

And then for another cook.... with soda ash, or an even stronger alkali like lye.   Cooking the inner bark again washes away much of the lignin and softens the cellulose (from which paper is made).  The bark turned darker, a sort of reddish brown.  To lighten the paper and strengthen it, I added some of a chopped up white linen tablecloth.  

[While I am at it I would also like to acknowledge the long labor of growing and harvesting flax, combing it to get at the long lustrous fibers, and doing whatever the textile laborers do to spin it into linen thread and weave it into white linen tablecloths..... which, when old and stained, got chopped up and pulped by a papermaker.]

And then the beater.....  my lovely little critter made by Mark Lander in New Zealand.  By his labor he manages to put an affordable, portable, Hollander beater in the hands of individual papermakers.

Thank you, Mark!

 My studio, my playground... and its inaugural venture in paper with local ingredients!

                                                   

Paper on the door!  No tin porch at my new studio yet.  But one will be built.  ... to amplify the rain.... without water paper is impossible.

Turmeric and Toast

           Turmeric and Toast

                It can barely be said

                we make faint gestures

                We burn our paper

                depend on smoke

                depend on faint breath 

                upwards

                Turmeric and toast

                this strange yellow

                foreign language 

                of exotic taste

                and we look for the 

                familiar

                to settle on our tongues

                to give speech

                to the dreams

                to the comforts

                that we will knit

                to encompass

                our beloveds

                to keep them warm

                as much as food

                this warmth against

                indifferent breezes

                shelter from rains

                we weave a cloak

                we raise a roof

                a belief.

               Our faint gestures

               have collected an enormous

               weight

               unshifting through many

               distortions.

               Our nakedness

               clothed in gold

               so heavy

               we long for

               the faint gesture

               the barely said

               the whisper

               of autumn.