Stephanie Damoff

Melt, 2022

Handmade paper ( cotton)

14.5 x 19 in

I am drawn to papermaking for its magical transformation of common materials into a sheet of paper or a work of art. I have been experimenting with plants and waste around my home to test and discover their qualities. This piece explores the materiality of the paper pulp, working with its free flow and resisting the confinement to rectilinearity.

Papermakers are often determined to tame fibers into smooth rectangles, losing along the way the texture of the original plant or fiber and often even its color. As I tried to tame high-shrinkage water chestnut into tight flat geometric form, I wondered why I shouldn’t instead explore the forms that it wanted to make and collaborate with the material. Thus, I freed myself to let shapes evolve, permitting cracking and introducing holes in the wet pulp that the paper could shape itself around as it dried. With pulp types I capture and imprint the flow of the pulp, drawn by scooping, tilting, spraying, and layering. Many layers of pulp can be couched together to make a very thin piece that testifies to the strength of the fibers. The dynamic beauty of the flow is sometimes hard to predict, but all the more gratifying.

About the artist

Stephanie Damoff

from Ridgewood, New York

damova.net. @damovagram

After focusing on photography for many years, I detoured to pursue an interest in making paper. The interest was sparked by my quantity of paper waste. I kept thinking, there must be a way to turn this into new paper. In 2017, I learned of a workshop that promised to do just that. I was immediately smitten with the possibilities that were made apparent by the different sorts of paper that could be used as the raw material and by the addition of plant and other scrap materials to make wet collaged pieces. Since then, I have been obsessed with using my household, textile, and garden waste to make paper, and adding other scrap materials to make paper pieces, sculptures, artist books, and collages, and to integrate my photographs and photographic images. I regularly use textiles and plant waste to make paper pulp, sometimes with the addition of pigments, but mostly enjoying the natural pigments of the plants and the dyed fabrics. My work reflects my lived environment and my studies in philosophy.