Nostalgia and Invisible Racism

Nostalgia and Invisible Racism

The title of this exhibit weaves three threads of thought. On one thread I was thinking about invisibility and race. I read, and copied onto handmade paper the text of the novel ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, about the many ways a black man can be rendered invisible in society.  Another thread was about racism invisible to the ones who hold it.  They either deny that it exists in them or really don’t see it.  The third thread was about nostalgia, the kind that looks back on pleasant memories while overlooking brutal history and racial injustice.  Nostalgia in the white South is a feature that is familiar to me.

I look back fondly on family dinner table arguments.  I valued our ability to talk about issues of the time even though they contained sentences like “society is not ready for integrated swimming pools yet”.  I could disagree without feeling the kind of despair and outrage that I feel today over yet another black body shot or incarcerated. Can the one be implicated in the other?  Does nostalgia contain an abeyance of responsibility?

I look back to memories like watching heavy rain through dark green trees surrounding my grandmother's screened porch in Atlanta. In a drawer somewhere is a letter proudly describing a long ago cousin who rode with the Red Shirts and how he raced on horseback to vote in three different polling places to help install Wade Hampton as governor of South Carolina in 1876.  Both of my parents were born and brought up in South Carolina. My great grandmother’s sisters sewed for the Red Shirts.  I grew up with these stories.

The work of this exhibit uses paper I made from the pulp of my grandmother’s journals.  The text of ‘Invisible Man’ pushes its way into this paper toward an undulating water stain. On the opposite wall more papers hang from a tatted thread. They are weighted with small scrolls bearing texts of South Carolina slave narratives. The wistful beauty of the paper bears scars barely hinted.  Much hangs in the balance.

detail, from chapter 4

Artist Statement, as mounted in the exhibit.

The soil of South Carolina has a place in my soul. To make peace with the South and my whiteness I have dug into layers of sentimentality tilled into the garden of family stories. Nostalgia can be dangerous. The sentimentality of the “Lost Cause” blurred the brutal foundations of the Southern economy. I think of a great great-grandfather who farmed the soil of the old South. I think about the soils of land and property, ownership of land and ownership of human beings. I conflate the words ‘soil’ and ‘soul’ in a reflection of the tangle of affections and cruelties embedded in the heritage of the American South. My emotional landscape with regard to my family’s legacy is fraught with contradictions just as America’s landscape is fraught with injustices. Healing will require tilling through thick layers of white nostalgic sentiments and turning under ingrained crops of racial animus. We must explore the present character of racist thinking before we can grow new crops and new possibilities.

‘INVISIBLE MAN’ Series

Text from Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" is written to the edge of a water stain on paper made from a southern matriarch's pulped journals

The Southern heritage is mine.  The journal shreds in the paper are my grandmother's.  The inherited repercussions of slavery and racism belong to America as a whole.  .

"Uncle Mad"  detail

The note, in my grandmother's handwriting, reads:

From the left Ann, Libby, Kitty Lewis, "Uncle Mad",  Billy & Robert Lewis.

In the back of Uncle Mad is our cook's (Clara Johnson) brother Tom (I think) who helped in the garden.

We were listening as Uncle Mad (age ?) played the accordion and told us about being born a slave & who were the kind masters and who were not.

'Prayers and Debts'

The little hanging scrolls each represent one of the 285 slave narratives collected in South Carolina during the Works Progress Administration’s Writers Project in the late 1930’s.

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.

Okra Festival - Burkville, Alabama - 29 Aug. 2015

                                                                                      

  
Okra Paper
August 29, 2015 I went to an Okra Festival in Burkville, Alabama, a small community in Lowndes County.  I went with my neighbor Judy Lessler the owner of Harlands Creek Farm.  We were both interested in okra.  She was interested in okra's history in the South and its origin as a crop brought from Africa along with the slave trade.  Okra connected the two of us to the loaded history we share as white southerners.

I offered to make paper from okra bast fiber to take with us. I spent the preceding fall, after the okra plants had dropped their leaves, harvesting the stalks.  I stripped the bark for cooking and cleaning, pounded the inner bark into pulp which formed a lovely yellowish paper. I made a darker grayish paper from bark fibers whose brown outer layer had not been cleaned away.  Paper is made of cellulose, found in the inner bark, the phloem.  The outer bark added dark flecks to the paper and darkened the final sheet.
  

  

Here is the hefty harvest, almost more than I could deal with by myself, which is why I left some of it with its brown bark still clinging.   






         




The well cleaned bark made lovely light paper.

Okra Festival











                       

Loree making okra paper

'Loree'   .. collage on okra paper