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.