The idea of a tent as a sculptural installation came from its significance for me as a safe, sheltering, mysterious space. Perhaps I remembered houses we built as children, out of dried corn stalks in the fields across from our home in Illinois. Also, I remember Helmut Becker's beautiful cocoon-like work, Sweat Lodge, made of amber flax and reeds. As a psychotherapist, human problems of separation and loneliness concern me deeply, particularly the importance of the bonds between infants and their mothers. The tent represents a maternal space. At first I intended to place a child's cradle, knitted from cloth and shaped like an oriole's nest, inside the tent. I made a bench from the wooden keel of an old boat to place beside the cradle. When I finished, it was clear to me that the tent would stay empty; I placed the cradle outside, hanging from a branch, beside the bench. There was separation, waiting, and the expectation of reuniting. Papermaking Coco Gordon and I made all the paper at her Watermark Press, in Tribeca, New York City. She taught me to make the thin flax paper sheets. By my rough calculations, three square feet of paper would produce strips that I could knit into slightly more than one square foot of fabric. I estimated I needed between eighty and ninety sheets of uniformly thin, strong paper. If the paper were too thick I could not knit it easily and it would not hang well; if it were too thin, it would be weak and might break. We used clean, long strands of line flax, cut by hand into 11/4 inch lengths. Coco beat the flax in batches of no more than 1[3/4] to 2 pounds in a five-pound Hollander beater (made to Douglass Howell's specifications under Helmut Becker's direction ten years ago). She beat the pulp for six to eight hours and lowered the blades very slowly during the first few hours, in order not to cut the fibers too quickly. This method has proved a good way to release the hemicellulose and produce a more translucent pulp. We formed the sheets on a vacuum table by pouring very thin pulp on lengths of twenty-four inch wide Pellon, using strips of foam rubber as barriers. We poured quickly and evenly, patting the pulp gently with open, flat palms to distribute the fiber. After vacuuming, we left the sheets on the Pellon for the first two pressings, between double layers of cotton linter blotters. The first pressing usually took two days, with special care given to getting the sheets back under pressure quickly so they would not shrink. Because we made the paper during a very humid summer, it sometimes dried more slowly. We pressed the paper four times, until completely dry. The surface was smooth and hard; the sheets crackled when I shook them. I am very grateful to Coco Gordon for preparing the pulp and helping me make the paper. I could not have done the project without her. Pigmenting We made two thirds of the sheets of paper with unpigmented gray-beige flax, a wonderful, colorless color. We were unable to find stock of the richer brown flax fiber to make paper for the darker borders and a horizontal strip around the tent. Therefore, we colored fifteen sheets with a small amount of Twinrocker water-soluble umber pigment. In addition, we pigmented twelve sheets with a mixture of umber and red oxide, for the roof section. I wanted the warmer color to "hold" the tent down. We pigmented a few sheets with blue to make a broad, sky strip with an opening in the roof. In a way we were producing yard goods and hoping the calculations would be right. At the end of the summer I had eighty-seven sheets of flax paper, each 20 inches by 44 inches. Cutting Paper I cut all the paper by hand into half inch strips. At first, thinking it would be easier, I cut around and around the rectangular sheets, ending in the middle. After knitting with these strips, I found that the corners sometimes tore when I put stress on the inside of a right angle. Thereafter I cut lengthwise strips and glued the ends together with Rhoplex archival glue. When I was well into the knitting I found that the pigmented paper was not as strong as the plain flax and it tore more easily. If even a small tear started across the strip, I tore it completely myself, overlapped the ends, and glued them. Once knitted, very few tears occurred during installation. I did not use the rather rough, prickly, deckle-edge strips because they were stiffer and did not slide well on the giant knitting needles. Knitting Originally I had expected to knit the tent on long dowels suspended from cross bars on my studio ceiling. This turned out to be very awkward, so I tried five foot long bamboo fishing poles. The bamboo was light and I found I could sit in a straight chair and knit with the ends of the poles propped on the floor, forming an inverted V. (My left shoulder and hand, which held the immobile knitting pole, got very stiff and ached, but, after swimming backstroke laps, the soreness gradually disappeared.) Occasionally I dropped half a row of stitches, so I devised cardboard stoppers for the ends of the poles. My knitting was sometimes uneven; the first few feet of a piece were tighter because there was no material to hold it down. I reconciled myself to the unevenness. As I finished knitting each side I hung it from the studio ceiling. I was not yet sure about the shape of the piece. Through research I found a wonderful book called Tents, the Architecture of the Nomads by Torvald Faegre. Gradually the shape emerged, a rectangular tent, reminiscent of the Bedouins', lower at one end and with a flat roof. Finishing and Installing By late December 1994, I clearly needed more sheets of paper than I had made, but Coco's paper studio was closed for the season. Going through my flat file drawers, I found a few sheets of lighter, butterscotch-colored flax paper, a few sheets of white flax with some beige mixed in, and a few sheets of gray-black. I did what I suppose any tent maker would do; I patched together some vertical strips to make just enough fabric to finish the piece. I liked the variations. The bamboo poles made the roof too straight and rectangular. An artist friend had given me a bundle of wonderful, long, slender hickory branches, stripped of their bark. Rubbed with a little umber, they became the roof poles. I knitted the last row of each side off onto a branch. For the long, nine-foot back side, I notched two branches together. Without something to pull the sides out and tether them, the tent hung straight down. On early morning walks I had frequently passed a beautiful weathered cedar trunk lying in a vacant lot. I had this cut into fourteen to eighteen inch lengths and split down the middle, I used these flat half logs to tether the corners of the tent. Once I had hung the sides in the gallery and lashed the branches together at the corners, I wove the sides of the tent together, like a sweater, using strips of flax and hand-spun flax string. Lastly, I hung a long weathered piece of wisteria vine in front of the tent, guarding the doorway. Sound One of the main lures of the knitted flax was the sound it made when moved, the rattle and rustle of the fabric. Though a ceiling fan moved the roof and sides of the tent gently, it produced little paper sound. I decided to record the sound of the moving paper and to add some Japanese shakuhachi flute music. In a sound studio in Brooklyn, my husband and I stood and moved a knitted panel of paper. We recorded this sound with variations in volume and added the flute music, to produce a thirty minute tape. Some viewers reported that it sounded like a person walking through fields of tall dry grass playing a flute. The sound was important for the installation, as the voice of the knitted paper. Conclusion Before I began the tent project, I decided to make a video record of the work, both its progression and the final installation. My niece, Barbara Malcolm, a cultural anthropologist and film maker, undertook the project and we edited it together. Despite the complicated and time-consuming process, I found videotape to be an important way to document installation work. In the end it was important to me that I had done all the work, repetitive as it was, with my own hands. The tasks of cutting, gluing, and knitting comforted me while I wondered if the tent would ever work out. Before one finishes a project like this and places it in the exhibition space, it leads an uncertain existence in the studio and in the mind of the artist. Installation work for me follows a process of trying to visually express a feeling without making it explicit. The artist's intent gives the space a mood, available to the viewer who allows himself to be there and feel it. For each person it is different. Though only a few hundred people saw the installation, they wrote long messages and let me know that being in the space was meaningful.
