Finding Justification for Making Something Out of Nothing

Hand papermaking is often promoted as a fun, creative activity. But real, sustained papermaking is like jumping out of a plane. Some might have fun for a while. but If you don’t have a good reason or a parachute the fun part can be short-lived. Between 1969, when I first experienced hand papermaking, and 1973 I had no sufficient reason to dip my hands in water , except to wash them. Making paper is far too labor intensive a task to be undertaken without proper justification. The eventual motive that drew me to the craft evolved from a printmaking issue: a desire to break free from the rectangular, wide margin, white paper format. My response was the shaped print. Paper could be torn into any shape, but still looked like torn paper. Shaped handmade paper was different. Shaped paper proved me a viable path and purpose for decades.

Whether one makes sheets or three dimensional paper, one must first make pulp. A machine, known as a hollander, separates fiber from fiber. What goes into the hollander emerges changed. A bale of cotton, a pine tree, an original Gutenberg Bible, an Armani suit; all are converted to worthless mush: pulp.

Water, energy, and friction can be forces of change. The papermaking hollander is a churning, tool of destructive power.

We have all witnessed cataclysmic events on a grand scale, intimately or through the lens of a television.  In the aftermath we view tragedy, devastation, and dispair.  I saw this as a child when my hometown was flattened by a tornado. What I learned was that we humans have a great desire and ability to rebuild, to bring something positive out of the ashes. There are poetic similarities between massive disasters and the minute actions of a hollander beater.  Things are pulled apart and threads are tossed about. Chaos takes away what has been.  And what is lost is lost.  Everything is ruined, but by this event, a way is cleared for a new beginning.  The slate is wiped clear, giving us an opportunity to begin anew.

This is why I make paper.  It is my intention to make something of importance and solidity from that which would otherwise be lost forever, that which might be known as "nothing".  Paper comes from the reorganization of a destroyed past. Papermaking creates from what has been destroyed. It contains that former past in a reshaped form, reincarnation, if you will.

Within each tiny fiber that makes up paper there is a history. Inside each fiber there is a hope. On each fiber rides a chance for renewal, for healing.

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