To start, the class cut sufficient shoots from a vacant lot near downtown Tuscaloosa to fill a 55 gallon oil drum. Steaming, stripping, and drying yielded ten pounds of bark. As an exercise in making traditional sheets we scraped and cooked half the bark with one pound of sodium carbonate, beat it with sticks, used formation aid in the vat, and formed the sheets Eastern-style. We cut half the remaining bark into inch squares which we tossed directly into the Twinrocker hollander beater. The uncooked bark quickly separated into fibers and seemed to vanish in the water. With no formation aid, trial sheets were made on an old, Western wove mold with a divided-deckle, couched on a wet felt, and pressed in a screw press. The sheets had many flecks of bark and excessively erratic edges. We decided that a cook would dissolve many of the flecks and had read in Hand Papermaking that sodium bicarbonate had been used by Meyer Bar-Ad in Israel for cooking mitnan. We were happy to be able to use a cheaper, less hazardous, and more readily available material, only later discovering that the mention of sodium bicarbonate had been a misprint for sodium carbonate. There was little apparent difference in the effects of the two chemicals in the cooking process. We rinsed the formation aid out of the stick-beaten first half, combined it with the second cook, and ran the whole ball of bark through the hollander. Then, to eliminate any possibility that our sheets would be mistaken for traditionally-made papers and to mask leftover flecks, we threw in a package of Rit Scarlet 5. After several days, the water became nearly clear and, through what appears to be a built-in retention ability, the fiber held the color. The mold and deckle were made especially for this project. A sandwich of 1/4", 1/8", and [bf01>16ef] woven metal-wire screen was stapled onto a wooden frame. The deckle, made unusually deep (11/4") to funnel the long fibers to the screen with each Western-style dip, was divided at the long center to form two sheets of 3" x 10". The sheets were couched directly onto pulp boards which were then hung on lines. The sheets, when still thick and not quite dry, were peeled off and transferred to chipboards. We placed these between two 1/4" plywood boards and ran them twice through a cylinder etching press under great pressure. The sheets, by then very thin and almost dry, were immediately peeled from the chipboards and stacked under light weight for several days, with occasional reshuffling, until completely dry. My class and I cannot answer whether these sheets are archivally correct. We strongly feel that artists must be explorers, able to plunge without restraint into the unknown. We leave it to scientists and critics to assess our efforts, to tell us what we did; and we leave it to conservators and preservationists to tell us what we did wrong. If we work together, there are enough labors for all.
