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

Table Intimacies

TABLE INTIMACIES

ArtSpace Raleigh 2-31 May 2014

Statement:

A table is an ordinary object. Powerful stories are built on bedrock ordinary. 

Economic engineers today use the “kitchen table” as a metaphor to refer to the personal household economies of daily life. Without those personal efforts all of their engineering would be moot.

The dinner table, the banquet table, the conference table….all are sets and stages for stories.  The stories I want to bring to the table are those of unheralded labor – the patient toil of flax and cotton harvesters, the skill of the weaver, the woodworker, the artistry of designers, and the never-ending care and labor of those who are responsible for the food on the table.

My collaborator in this exhibit is a worm (actually lots of them), Eisenia Fetida, the red wriggler. 

Beneath our feet is a universe of soil.  Microcosms of flora and fauna tend to the richness of life. Their daily labor goes mostly unheralded.  Ordinary as dirt. 

Ann Corley Silverman

Sacred Table -

Table and Cloth -

process…..

Breakfast with Cantalope - more images and information about this piece can be found in another blog entry in 2013.  Situating Food - Food for Thought

Souls of Plants -  the brown 'lace' of the tree form is cantaloupe rind after worms had been working.

Mischief in the living room

drawing by Eleanor Beard Hatton

I spent some time on Christmas day thinking about my great-grandmother, who spent a lot of time thinking about love.

Two works from the Columbus Metropolitan Library 2013

Art Unbound: an invitational   Oct.21-Nov.21 2013  

"CARBON"

My daughter, Elena, collected a bin full of books from the library loading dock that were destined for recycling.  I couldn't be there to get them myself.  I had had an idea and I asked her for some hard bound editions, roughly the same size, and she gathered all the Reader's Digests (among many other books).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaW8tzo9iWg

Those editions were destined for an experiment at turning books into bio-char.  Bio-char is a way of using charcoal, by grinding it up and digging it into the soil, to improve the soil's nutrients and its ability to retain moisture.  It is a way of recharging the earth so that the carbon of life can be productively reused.  It seemed right to me that if trees give life to these pages of our cultural wealth then we should return those pages to the soil for new wealth.  The work is called "Carbon".  Though I know that burnt books have emotional impacts well beyond their constituent materials it is a recognition of that shared constituent that I am after.

"PEBBLED VOLUME"

The first book I worked on, from the crate of books my daughter brought me, was a hard bound edition whose size, shape, and content called to me.  It's title "Inside the Third Reich" promised so many emotionally conflicting themes.  Could I make it into an object of quiet reflection on the passage of time and the possibility of wisdoms gained?  I must thank my daughter, who identifies as Jewish though I do not, for her thoughtful gathering of materials for me to use for this show.  This was an opportunity to think about contemporary violence in the world and Albert Speir's warning about the danger of individual power, especially combined with the exponentially more lethal weaponry that technology has placed in our hands.  Time and a river's pebbling of rock point to a gentler way of shaping the shards of our angers.

Situating Food / Food for Thought

Banvard Gallery October 9 - December 31, 2013
Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University

The flesh of the cantalope is gone.  Only the lace of its rind remains.
The worms are gone.  Only traces of their meal and their presence remain.

Handmade paper with cotton placemats, sewn to wood panel, plexiglass,
and polished walnut frame.

Vermiculture Furniture Design - Spring 2013

This was an exciting experiment in workshopping ideas about bringing a living decomposer ecosystem into the human domestic space.  Wonderful group of Ohio State University students, two of whom worked extra hard to put this book together.  Check it out!

http://issuu.com/wormsinourfurniture/docs/vermibook


With a small contribution from me (below)  and amazing work on everybody's part.

                                             Crochet and Compost

                                                     
Soil

The sibilant 's' slides quietly into the open oil
of a liquid landfall.
A slight growl pushes air into what is round
beneath the feet.
Ground.
The dental stability of final sound an anchor
on planet underfoot.
But here, the liquid.
Soil.
No labial pout, no punctuation.

So much for definition.

Worms turn in the soil of our syntax,
enriching excrementally
the nature of our understanding.
All lips and liquid boundaries.
Mouthfuls of earth in endless periods.
This life.  And this life.  And this life.

A surface of soil, at midpoint to tree,
cushions the foot.
Some surface in a plowed field sucks at the boot
and removes it.

Some surfaces slip inside and under.
Feet sink into surf.
Toes splayed in mud and sand grow no roots.
Attempting, though, a pirouette,
Striking some balance of the awe-struck.