Lyn had hired Margot to design the interior for Animart, a 16,000 square foot pet store in Madison. Margot wanted to make the interior look like a park, complete with trees, lampposts, a small pond, and animals. Could I make whimsical animals out of cast paper? "No problem!" said I, without missing a beat, although I had previously only made abstract sculpture from my special mixture of Twinrocker abaca and rag fibers.  Margot and I met one week later to go over the floor plan and to discuss the artistic possibilities of cast paper. She wanted to convert eight structural I-beams into trees so that the initial visual impact would be inviting and sensuous (as only pulp can be) and would subdue the hard-edged look of the fixtures. In the center of the store a walkway would meander through a park-like environment, flanked by areas for different types of pets. Drawing on my experience designing sets for theater companies, I saw the whole project taking shape as a large stage set. I became more and more excited about the opportunity to design installations for each space.  I developed ideas and made sketches and cost estimates for each section of the store. I had a pretty good sense of how much pulp I would need for the various pieces, but I had absolutely no concept of how much labor the trees would require, nor the engineering problems they would present.  Luckily, some of my proposed installations were eliminated from the final plans, because I would not have had enough drying time for all of the components I had envisioned. I ended up with only two months to create all of the pieces and one  31   Entrance to the tropical fish area, Wet and Wild, showing three relief sculptures, all cast from abaca.    month for installation. For a job of this magnitude, I had to work outdoors at the mercy of Wisconsin weather, which includes the wet "lake effect" from Lake Michigan. Because I did not begin until late summer, the nights had become cool and damp and the pieces took a long time to dry.  I created seven sets of installation pieces for Animart: a large lizard, a fish relief, a vegetable garden relief, a southwestern United States wall relief, three trees, a cactus, and assorted small animals.  The lizard is eight feet long and has a twelve foot tail. It hovers over the interior entrance soffit of the store. I created a plaster relief mold over which I put cheesecloth and thick handfulls of abaca pulp as a stiff underlayer. I poured yellow abaca over this and then created circular and linear designs in oranges, pinks, greens, and blacks with pieces of wet paper that I molded separately and fused wet-an-wet to the body of the creature. When the lizard was dry, I lifted him off the mold and filled him with nylon pillow stuffing. I glued a form-fitted backing of lauan mahogany plywood to the inside perimeter of his body, for mounting.  For the fish area I made three large fish (about 3 ft. x 5 ft. x 8 in.) in relief and a large starfish. All are now mounted on a wall with a striking neon sign that reads "Wet and Wild." Because these p'ieces are much smaller than the lizard, I did not need to stuff them or back them. The toughness of the abaca when poured out in thick layers would hold the fish's rounded shapes. To make these shapes, I poured the pulp in a large oval onto a heavy blanket and laid a piece of unframed plastic screening over the top, pressing out surplus water with a sponge. When the pulp dried to a leathery stage, I rolled the piece quickly over a crude form made of foam rubber and towels. I made the fins and eyes separately, and glued them to the bodies when dry.  The vegetable garden relief mural was a highlight of the project. A crew of people helped me make the veggies for the mural and bark, leaves, and apples for the trees. They also helped me varnish everything with a mixture of thinned-out Liquitex gel medium and Roscoflamex flame retardant. We fabricated two relief murals measuring 4 ft. x 8 ft. each. The framework for these we made of two Hollywood-type flats framed out in maple and covered with a Vi inch thick sheet of lauan mahogany. The murals give the impression of a cutaway view of vegetables growing underground, with a layer of foliage above, topped off with stands of sunflowers and hollyhocks. Morning glory vines trail through it all, off the flats and onto an adjoining, barn-like wall.  We molded the vegetables over actual produce that we had covered with thin layers of cheesecloth. The   cheesecloth made it easier for us to remove the paper from the beets, carrots, onions, and radishes that posed for us. In order to make the sunflowers and all the foliage for these murals, I cut shaped deckles from Styrofoam insulation board and we poured pulp through them onto large window screens, which we had suspended over sawhorses in the yard. We also made the foliage for these murals and for two of the trees this way. We embedded a piece of wire in each leaf and left enough protruding from the end so that we could fasten the leaves individually to stalks and branches. We ended up making thousands of leaves.  For the reptile area, I proposed a theatrical installation that looks like a cliff wall in the Southwest. The wall curves and is eight feet tall by forty-five feet long. Made of wood and built out in relief with carved Styrofoam, joint compound, cheesecloth, and white glue, the wall has irregularly shaped holes which reveal reptile tanks and is painted to resemble rainbow rock. I recreated some petroglyph images (and invented some new ones) to embellish the surface. The I-beam in this section I covered with a huge, continuous sheet of abaca paper (4 ft. x 12 ft.) over a concrete forming tube. The cast paper sheet was colored two shades of green to suggest a saguaro cactus and I wrapped it with two oversized snakes molded of abaca. I also created some smaller critters that perch above the walls of the cliff. First I created crude shapes for these animals (an oversized toad and an iguana) from newspapers bound with masking tape, and then squirted liquid foam insulation material over them. When the foam had hardened, I carved the toad and the iguana to the desired proportions and covered them with hand-sized hunks of pigmented wet paper which I had pressed out onto a board ahead of time.  The most challenging pieces of the entire Animart project for me were the three trees (pared down from the original eight). Margot really had given me a tall order when she asked if I could make them from paper, mostly because of the large amount of labor required to make the components. I had decided early on that I would use  WINTER 1997  concrete-forming tubes as armatures for the trun , carpet tubes and dowels for the branches of the linden tree, carved foam armatures for the branches of the willow tree, and real apple branches for the apple tree. We created apples from round wads of newspaper covered with small, thick sheets of wet pulp. All armatures were covered with pigmented pulp in bar designs. Like the cactus, the bark for the trunks" as made of sheets measuring 4 ft. x 12 ft. Smaller shee were poured out onto boards, peeled off, and applied in sections over the branches. We also covered all of the exposed wires which attached the leaves to the branches with wet pulp. For the willow tree, we created foliage by dipping long strips of cheesecloth into vats of green pulp. We line-dried these before attaching them in clumps to the branches. When the trees were assembled over the I-beams, we had to stabilize the branches by suspending them from the twent foot ceiling with black fishing line. All together, it took four of us one month to complete the three trees.  I really enjoyed the process of creating these pieces for Animart. As I write this, I am at work on an installation of trees for another Madison store. This time, I have sculpted the trunks from plaster and joint compound, and created the foliage from abaca fiber.  Would I do another project like the Animart installation? In a heartbeat.  33

‍