Created at Camp Colton in Colton OR, as a part of the Stelo Paper making Residency
I don’t know where this comes from anymore. Or I guess I thought I knew at one point. Clumping it up with someone else’s experience of being a vessel, encouraging the world to imagine, opening up to what spews up from the soil and pours down from the sky. Maybe it is a way to process. Maybe it’s a way to heal. No. No, I don’t think that really is my experience at all. It’s not the creation of some space. It’s not some molding of past memories. I have no certainty, no fancy way to explain how this should or may or could interact with you.
I can talk about hand making paper a little bit though. Yes! Paper. All the paper here is handmade. Representing at least that the inspiration, if it can be traced to anything, is rooted in the desire to learn how to make something. I mean to really learn. To really make as well. From the raw material, living and breathing, to something rugged and representative of its source. That’s what handmade paper really is. Rugged and representative of its source. It is a package holding itself. An individual character hidden in the particulates.To make handmade paper is to leave behind the desire of uniformity. Or to find a new, looser understanding of uniformity, of equality, of understanding a material as made up of materials.
And “after it all settles into paper.” Well, that’s the job for all of us to envision. Just to get to that place, where we can see the world and its constituents, down, way down perhaps to their individual characters hidden among the particulates. The fiber of it all. The whole world as representative of its source. The world as paper. The world as one thing full of many things coming together.
Of course that’s the job for us. Or for our imaginations. A job for what goes on between our ears in collaboration with the rest of our body. The rest of the system. The rest of the little creatures living in, on, and around us. To be able to look a bit more closely at what all these things are made up of. These clothes, these blankets, the notepad, and the bathroom pipelines and the stovetop coils and the floors and homes and it all.
