Michael Durgin: As I understand it, your introduction to paper casting was in 1979, when you were at Frank Gallo's studio, Editions in Cast Paper. Did you have any previous exposure to handmade paper or to paper pulp?

Therese Zemlin: I don't think I had any exposure whatsoever, before being introduced to the casting process by Frank Gallo.

MD: Is that when you were a student at Illinois?

TZ: I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. I never took any courses from Gallo, but I was interested in paper casting. I was doing a lot of weaving at that time and probably ran across hand papermaking in some publication having to do with weaving and fibers, maybe Fiberarts magazine.

Gallo invited me to his campus studio and gave me a quick lesson in how to cast paper into molds. I was using molds that I had also used for bronze pieces—plaster molds that I was using for making wax positives for bronze casting. Once I was through with them, I would experiment using handmade paper, with fabric dyes.

I got some pieces that I thought were pretty successful, but I abandoned the casting process because it was very difficult to get something that looked finished, and the process was too indirect. At that time, fabrics, rubber, and all kinds of other materials that could be assembled seemed more direct to me than handmade paper. I fooled around with paper casting for about a year. Then I didn't get back to it until about five years later.

MD: When you did come back to it, did you find that what you had learned from working at Editions in Cast Paper proved useful?

TZ: I actually didn't start working at Editions until 1987. I picked up papermaking again in about 1985 when I was in graduate school, at the University of Texas, in Austin.

There was no paper facility to speak of at school, so I picked up where I'd left off, technically. I went back to coloring the paper with fabric dyes, using cotton linter, mixing it in a bucket.

Paper offered solutions to problems that had to do with the meaning of the work and how I wanted people to respond. I had been doing figure sized pieces using a concoction


of cement, rhoplex, and sand. I was building steel armatures, putting steel mesh over the armatures, and then covering them with this kind of stucco. The use of that came, in part, from living in San Antonio. There's a lot of stucco architecture and stucco architectural details.

I wanted my work to function as metaphor, so that it could mean different things to different people, depending what kind of information the viewer brought to the piece. The problem with cement was that no matter what the form was, no matter how biomorphic, no matter what the scale, no matter what I did with color or other found objects, no matter how much I tried to take this material into a new context, the cement always read "architecture."

In addition to that, on a more intuitive, visceral level, I didn't like working with the material. I would have continued using it if I felt the pieces were doing what I wanted, but they weren't.

For technical reasons and for reasons having to do with content, I switched to paper. I built armatures just as if I were going to put cement on them, but I used paper instead. I started out by taking linter with a lot of rhoplex in it and patting it onto the surface. Eventually I realized I could actually pour the pulp onto the lath.

I discovered that paper is really very much a chameleon. Because sculpture has not traditionally been made of paper, a paper sculpture can function with a lot less baggage than a sculpture made of bronze or fabricated stainless steel or carved wood. My work often functions at its greatest potential as far as metaphor when it's made of paper. The paper can be architecture. It's very skinlike, so it's biomorphic. It's also very vegetable-like, so it could be plant, it could be animal. When I started letting the armatures show through, there was also that sort of architecture or machine quality. I was getting all of those different levels of meaning that I wanted with the paper; I wasn't getting those with the cement.

MD: Once you made that switch, did you ever go back to cement?

TZ: No.

MD: You've mentioned working with fibers, bronze, and steel. What other media have you worked with?

TZ: I worked with wood to some degree, and with neon and glass.

MD: What were the neon and glass pieces like?

TZ: Those were pretty important. After I finished undergraduate school, in 1981, I moved to Minneapolis and took some courses in neon and glass at the University of Minnesota. I had done some glass casting at the University of Illinois. I was doing the same thing with glass that I was doing with paper, taking plaster molds and casting it. I used neon in conjunction with paper and also with food.

I often investigated food as an art material, as a transformative process of taking something out of one context and putting it into another. For one piece I bought a bag of apples and used my drill press to drill a 1/2" hole in the core of each apple. (That, in itself, was a real nonsense kind of experience.) I


sliced the apples very thinly and strung the slices on a neon tube. About half the length of the 8 foot neon tube had apple slices on it. I set it aside for a month to let the apple slices dry. When the piece was hung up and plugged in, the light from the neon went into the fibers of the apple slices, so that they glowed. The image had to do with the idea of the electrical energy of the neon and food as an energy source. It was absurd, but also beautiful to look at. Kind of seductive.

There's a strong correlation between food as an art material and paper pulp. You take something like an apple or a potato and the way its shape changes as it dehydrates, the way the whole character changes as it dehydrates is exactly the same as if you took a ball of pulp and let it dry. It has the same kind of shrinkage, the same kind of potential translucency. Even though I wasn't making paper at that time, that sensibility was there.

MD: So that when you did come back to paper, there had been an undercurrent; it hadn't been so much a moving away from paper as putting it in the background.

TZ: Paper was always on the back burner, even when I wasn't using it. If I bought a piece of Rives BFK to draw on, I treated it as a piece of sculpture. Rather than paper being a substrate, it was an integral part of the piece, more than just a surface.

MD: After Austin you went back to Champaign, Illinois, to work at Editions in Cast Paper. Did you work there for long?

TZ: I was there for about three and a half years.

MD: You became heavily involved in pigmenting. Was that your job there?

TZ: I was the paper pulp colorist. We were doing contract work for Yakov Agam and Victor Vasarely and we were also doing Gallo's work. I was responsible for all of the color work, developing the colors and then producing the colored pulps.

MD: What was happening to your own artwork while you were working there?

TZ: When I started working for Gallo in 1987, paper was already prevalent in my work. I had just completed two large hanging pieces, one of them was a string of large beads. Another piece was similar, a string of cone shapes. Another piece was a pile of objects, which looked like oversized breakfast cereal and car mufflers, a metaphorical dump. Those were done with cotton linter colored with fabric dyes over steel armatures and mesh.

Since undergraduate school most of the sculpture that I had done had been in earth tones and muted colors. That's what I wanted in the work but also, technically, that's all that I could really get. Other kinds of colors weren't even an option.

Once I started doing color work for Gallo, I was surrounded day in and day out with very bright, intense colors. In working for Victor Vasarely: I'd make up colors for him and we'd send them off to France. We'd get little notes back: "Bluer!" "Greener!" I was putting so much pigment in the pulp that the paper didn't even feel like paper; it felt like pastel


sticks. Also, there was a lot of waste. A lot of colors didn't get used. One of the perks of the job was getting to use these leftover materials for my own work.

The first piece I did after starting to work for Gallo was Tower of Balls. The balls are solid pulp, about the size of oranges and grapefruits, in all different shades of very bright colors. For me, the saturated color was a radical shift from the muted, earth tones I had been using.

At that time the format and the content—everything about the piece—came from an initial response to the material and the access to the material. All papermakers know that when you're cleaning out a beater or cleaning a strainer, you have this wad of pulp and you make it into a ball. These just started accumulating. We lined them up around the shop. It was sort of a joke that turned into a sculpture.

I was interested in taking advantage of this unusual problem of having too much paper pulp. By this point I was going to the Friends of Dard Hunter conferences and meeting others working with paper as a medium. I was developing some awareness of what else was going on and thinking, "How many papermakers have the luxury of having too much pulp? How can I take this unusual problem and turn it into a way of approaching paper in sculpture that would be innovative?” I feel like I succeeded in addressing these questions.

For a while I was experimenting with huge pieces that were solid pulp. Dealing with the contradiction of paper as a precious, light-weight, ephemeral material, and asking "How can I take out notions of paper, how can I put a twist on it so that it starts becoming massive, not only in size but also in weight? What can I do with paper to contradict all of those things that we think of paper as being?" I also wanted to contradict the notion of paper as a substrate, so that paper would start becoming form.

MD: At Editions in Cast Paper, you switched from fabric dyes to pigments and, in so doing, were able to move away from earth tones to more saturated, intense, and very rich colors.

TZ: That's how it happened for me. Actually, you can get very intense colors from fabric dyes, but the color is very fugitive.

MD: So, pigments made sense in terms of longevity.



TZ: Right.

MD: Let's talk about the imagery of your work.

This repeats some of what you've already said, but for me your pieces embody both industrial—as I think of it; you talk about a “machine” or "architectural" look—and also organic elements. Some of the results are surprising; perhaps a familiar form with an unexpected, bright color. Others are mysterious, evocative, or metaphorical. Can you talk about where some of your imagery comes from?

TZ: My pieces will transform as they're built, but there's usually a source for my work that goes back to nature. A form will be based on some fragment of nature: a little bit of a pine cone or part of a bug. Something that you would hold in your hand rather than some grand vista.

MD: Certainly some of the titles of your works point to that: Pollen Galaxy and Tendril for example.

TZ: Tendril is actually based on a curly French fry...

MD: Quasi-organic, I guess. When I say "industrial" I think of your piece Joined at the Neck, for example. It has elements that suggest light bulb ends, duct tubing, mesh. In its symmetry and shape, it has an organic quality, too.

TZ: I had some unusual experiences as a child. My dad is an anatomist. Sometimes he would take my brother and me over to his anatomy lab and he'd show us what he was working on. He would have a cadaver that looked whole and he would very carefully take off the whole rib cage. Inside there'd be a beautiful dissection with all of the fat and connective tissue gone. There was no blood, either; it had been drained out. These were very clean. After he took the rib cage, he could take out the lungs and other organs. It was like being under the hood of a car, but it was a body.

There was also a lot of respect for the body; it was always very compelling. He is also a woodworker and worked on cars. I always, way back as a little kid, equated machines and the building of furniture and the fixing of cars as really in the same realm as our bodies. This idea is a very dominant theme in my work. It keeps coming back.

MD: Do you feel that your imagery has evolved over time or that it's more a continuous progression, explorations of the same sorts of things?

TZ: I see things as groups but I also see them as a continuum. I equate groups of work with the places: Minneapolis, San Antonio, Austin, Champaign, Columbia, North Carolina. I see things as places.

For over ten years I have generally worked on groups of pieces that I intend to show together. I'm interested in installation as a format, although I'm uncomfortable with the term in reference to my own work. Installation is partly a response to a space, where the space and the architecture become part of the piece, and I'm not quite dealing with these issues in my work.

I'm very aware that I've always been on the edges of categories; on the edge of installation and on the edge of what's going on in fibers and sort of on the edge of sculpture. I don't fit neatly and squarely into any category. I think I'm most involved, in terms of categories, with paper.

I've done pieces as groups. I might make a couple of really large pieces and six to eight smaller pieces to show together. I once made eleven pieces to be shown together. For the next installation I selected a few of those and created other works to go with them. When I start on pieces, I don't really work in a linear fashion, in that I make one piece and then another piece and then another piece. I work with groups of pieces.

MD: So you're doing multiple pieces at a time in different stages of completion?

TZ: Conceptually, yes. I have to construct [or assemble] them one at a time due to space limitations, but when I'm working on one piece I have a pretty good idea of the other


five pieces that will go with it. I will have already done drawings and patterns.

MD: Let's talk about your latest kinetic works, which intentionally move, by design, rather than just by air currents. Can you talk about those and where they came from?

TZ: In the summer of 1995 I went to the Paper and Book Intensive at Penland. One of the reasons I went there was to be a student, because I think as a teacher it's very important to get back in touch with what it's like to be a student, what it's like to be the learner.

One of the workshops I took was titled Illuminated Book Forms, with Tim Barrett and Richard Flavin. It turned out to be a how-to but also an experimental workshop in Japanese lanterns. The idea was to take the lantern form and translate it into a book form. I really didn't do the book part of it. I started making these things and, of course, it was sculpture—forget the text.

MD: Is the form a steel coil covered with paper?

TZ: We were using wooden reed and I've used wood since then. It's coiled around a notched wooden mold, then the paper is attached to the reed, and then the mold is popped out. I got that information from Richard and Tim and just took off with it. It had everything to do with my work and what I was thinking about.

I got home from PBI and within two days I was making larger molds out of wood, doing all kinds of drawings and figuring out how the forms could combine with steel forms. I had been selected to participate in the workspace program at Dieu Donné at the end of the summer and my plan had been to spend the whole summer getting armatures ready to prepare for it. After the Penland workshop I called up Mina Takahashi at Dieu Donné and told her I wanted to change my proposal completely. She and Paul Wong were very gracious and accommodating.

My new work really took off at this point. I had a new way of putting things together that started to shift the work into a different place. On the one hand, the forms were very similar to the forms that I was already using, because I had to fabricate molds and deal with ideas of geometry, right angles and how I was going to put this thing together. So there was a building aspect to the piece. The forms that I made, on the one hand, had a mechanical presence to them but, on the other hand, they felt organic because of the paper, the spiral, the fact that they could collapse, and the implication of movement. Anything you make with this technique, if you collapse the form, if you crunch it down, there's always implied movement.

MD: So, pushing them beyond just the implication, you actually make them move.

TZ: Yes. Another challenge in working with these lantern forms has to do with formal problems and design problems, which correlate directly with problems concerning content and metaphor. It's all interwoven.

I found it difficult to have the lantern forms function as complete, original sculpture because of strong and undeniable associations of paper lanterns with Noguchi, Akari, and Pier One. The forms want to be


illuminated. I challenged myself to make complete pieces without putting lamps in them, without lighting them from within. I'm approaching that problem in three ways.

In one approach , which I took at Dieu Donné in 1995, I used very bright, dark, brilliant, intense, opaque colors. The paper doesn't have any translucent quality whatsoever. You couldn't see through them even if you had a light behind them. Also, the color and the form are strong and seem complete. Another way I'm working now is using Japanese kozo papers to construct complex forms with unmistakable references to plants and figures. The third way I'm trying to complete these pieces is to put motors in them. The movement completes the piece.

MD: I see. You have attached the motors to some of the ribs inside such that they undulate. You've described them, beyond just being "alive," as "wormlike or larval."

TZ: They're very bizarre. They seem to swim and breathe.

MD: Do they make sounds, too? Or is it a silent effect?

TZ: They make some sound but it will change, because I'm replacing all of the motors.

MD: So that they don't make a sound?

TZ: No, so that they don't break. I would like the pieces to run for a month without breaking down.

When you move away from one danger you start getting into another. Another problem is Japanese sci-fi: Mothra. If I get too indulgent with these pieces, they start taking on the characteristics of invented, mutated giants, which is not really what I'm looking for. I want the pieces to be able to float in and out of different metaphors, to evoke different levels of meaning and experience for different people.

There's another aspect to the work that I've been interested in, all along, in terms of what I would like the audience or the viewer to get out of the work. There's a frame of mind where you're starting to wake up and for a few brief moments the dream that you were having makes sense. Then, as you wake up, the dream stops making sense. The more awake you become, the less sense the dream makes. If you write the dream down you remember it, or occasionally if there was something vivid or disturbing about it you remember, but then you just forget it. And then you go off to your daily activities: taking a shower, going to work, making coffee, or going to the studio. But I'm very interested in that state, where nonsense makes sense for a few brief moments. That frame of mind, that experience of things being on the edge between sense and nonsense is one that I am always striving for in my work, not necessarily in one self-contained object, but in a roomful of objects.

MD: That seems to tie in with the idea of materials out of context or in conjunction with dissimilar materials—paper and steel—and other things you have been doing for a long time.

TZ: Yes. Every once in a while I'll make a piece starting with an issue or a specific idea. The piece makes perfect sense. In a way there's a certain amount of release in finally having something that makes sense. But it's never as interesting as the pieces that


are more of a struggle, that never quite do make sense. Once it makes sense it's been completely digested.

MD: Right. And then there's nothing the viewer can bring to it; it's too flat or stark.

TZ: Yes.

MD: In what direction do you see your artwork moving? Do you have any idea?

TZ: There's a very important element to this kinetic piece that has been a total flop so far, but I'm going to pursue it.

I want these pieces to be powered by solar panels. The idea in my mind, the image, would be to have a whole group of pieces in an indoor space and a solar panel somewhere out on the roof. As the sun starts coming up the pieces move very slowly; as the sun rises higher and higher they move faster and faster. If the sun goes behind a cloud, they slow down. As the sun comes back out, they speed up. In the late afternoon, they slow way back down again and then they stop.

You asked me earlier what kind of sources I used in my work or where my work came from. I mentioned that I look a lot at little objects that you can hold in your hand; lots of bits of the natural world, little natural structures. But I also think a lot about phenomena and cycles; the whole experience of waking up. And the spiral not only being a form in objects but a form in tornadoes and the weather, vortexes. And the motion that is set off when we swallow our food.

I'm very intrigued with the solar idea. Because it's not just me that's responding to these ideas and these phenomena. It's also the pieces responding to the environment, directly. This first kinetic piece was supposed to be the solar piece, but it's not. So now I have to rethink the solar piece, not only the technical stuff but the whole piece. It's turning into a whole new piece.

MD: Will it look like this one except for the solar power?

TZ: It will have the solar power and the collapsing and expanding forms, but the forms will probably be a lot smaller and there will be more of them.

We've spent quite a bit of time discussing materials and technique, which I normally don't do. I want to mention, though, that I've been buying all of my papers for the kinetic pieces. Paper has been an important material in my work, but I also don't feel a need to always make it myself. These kozo papers that are being made in Japan are much better for what I need than what I can make at this point. And, if they're available, then why make them?

MD: They are the means to the end.

TZ: Yes. As much as I like to make paper and be around paper pulp, the sculpture comes first. </div>

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