Tom Bannister: To prepare for this interview, I took the opportunity to read Emily Dickinson’s poem that is part of the inspiration for this piece. “Banish Air from Air— / Divide Light if you dare—” and I can’t say I really understand the rest of it. [Laughter.] Lesley Dill: The mind loves a certain amount of mystery. The mind is attracted to a place where it hasn’t been—which is what we’ve all done on this project. Divide Light (Healing Man) An interview with Lesley Dill,Gail Deery, and Scott R. Skinner Lesley Dill, Divide Light #2, 2006, 42 x 42 inches, giclee, mixed media, and stamp printing on Japanese handmade paper with bamboo. Produced by Hand Papermaking, Inc. at Dolphin Press & Print/Maryland Institute College of Art with support from The Drachen Foundation and Hiromi Paper International. Photo: Matthew Stubbs. If there is too much mystery then there is confusion and unhappiness. But if there is just enough mystery to be seductive ,that is where, naturally, the mind likes to go, from the known to the unknown. So with Dickinson’s “Divide Light if you dare,” somewhere, inside our bellies, we know what that means, but our minds don’t know exactly what that means. So when that language is paired with a kite, it somehow completes the metaphor behind the language. But it doesn’t quite make sense. Because if it were too pat, we’d go, “Oh, I get it,” and something in our mind would dismiss it…When I think of a 10 x 10 foot artwork, flying high in the sky, and then 2,000 three-inch miniature kites that will also miraculously fly, it seems like the objective of the project is to attempt the impossible. Did it seem that way to you all, especially in the early stages? Scott Skinner: I don’t think I realized the scope of the project at first and then it began to dawn on me that this is big. Not just physically big, but it would take a lot of people, a lot of thought ,it wouldn’t be one person’s project. We all have to let go, bend a little bit, and let it take its own shape. That’s exciting, yet at the same time, there is a lot of unknown. I think most of my fear was dispelled the first time we all talked together. Via email, it was very difficult to get a handle on what might happen. Also, none of us really knew each other. I knew Gail, but I didn’t know most of you nor the students. It was kind of like an intersection of blind dates to make a work of art. [Laughter.] Gail Deery: In my career as a master printer and master papermaker, working on collaborative projects, I have never worked with students as actual hands-on facilitators. Generally in a collaborative project, the artist is working directly with the master printer and possibly with students assisting the printer. In this case, there were 21 students, Scott, and myself working with Lesley. There is always a certain amount of vulnerability in any artist/printer collaboration, but when you have 24 people working on a project together, it is an enormous undertaking, with a lot of uncertainty. The project partially became about how all oft these people would partner together to make something. We were all invested in a shared risk. We probably all had some doubts, yet I think there is an important place for doubt. If we had all arrived at MICA thinking, “Ah, we’ll do it, no problem,” then we might have not have been thinking as widely. Also, doubt opens up the skeptical and discerning mind. The level of concentration and focus was amazing. The one thing that was really eye-opening for me was when Lesley said to the students at the end of the day, “I need to pull my soul out of each one of you.” As the collaboration was taking place, I could see that Lesley was putting her energy into each and every person working on the project…… The students also had to let that happen. They had to breakdown their boundaries of ownership, which is something we all have to do in collaboration. On a logistical level, this was quite an amazing feat, bringing the efforts together of an artist in New York City, a master printer/papermaker in Baltimore, aerodynamic specialists in Colorado and Seattle, project coordinators in Japan and in Maryland, and then 21 students at MICA. How did the collaboration evolve? I think that the first important collaborative decision we made was the paper selection. It was important that we pick a fairly dense, strong paper for its flight properties. Once we selected one, it was up to Lesley and Gail to work with it. My other concern early on was the overall form. All photos on this page spread: Divide Light (Healing Man), work-in-progress at MICA, February 26–March 3, 2006. Photos by Kyle Van Horn. Clockwise this page: Skinner and Dill; ink stamps; Dill with student, Chris DiPietro; detail of hand; ink-stamp printing; project collaborators (Aimee Burg and Shanti Grumbine missing in this photo by Bruce Weller). In its original state, I wasn’t sure that Healing Man could fly upright because it is asymmetrical in shape. I didn’t want to force Lesley to change it, but there were a couple of little things that we did alter, like attaching the fingers to the body and to the leg. If those hands were even an inch away from the body, they would become living objects in the air and it would have been really difficult to deal with. As sculpture, it would have been fine, but as flying sculpture, not so. Little changes that appear to be subtle were huge for me. It won’t fly like the perfect kite. It won’t be a kite that we’ll use for weather observations…[Laughter]…but it will fly. I suspect that the others went through those same processes. I know that we all love handmade paper, but did it ever feel like a limitation to you? Did you think, “Oh, if we could have just done this with vinyl it would have been so much better”? Using handmade paper ties this project to the kite tradition in Japan, all over Asia, and even in Europe and the United States. It has been proven over centuries that paper is a great material for kites. What did we use for kite making until forty years ago? Paper. We all started with crude newspaper kites, or butcher paper kites. Paper is what you use first. And the kozo paper is beautiful but it is also functional. It is strong, lightweight, and flexible. It has all the properties that we need in kites. Paper, and this particular paper, having been handmade in such a technological era, has touch. We all felt the beauty of this paper. This, along with the little bit we learned about kites from the images Scott sent to us in advance, made us realize that the project had to be about luminosity, about light hitting paper and light going through paper. There are very few opaquely painted a reason the kite. I am not a painter, I am almost everything else, but, my love is printmaking and my other love is paper. I have been schooled at Landfall Press and Dieu Donné, so what we tried to do was explore the relationship between light and paper through a range of printmaking techniques. In our book, paper, and print classes, our students handle all kinds of papers in the classroom but this project gave the students an in-depth experience with a beautiful Japanese paper. The students developed a complete vocabulary of how many processes engage with the fibers, the structure, and the lay of the paper. Within this very short period of time—three days—they did a quick learn on how the paper reacts when a brush goes across it ,how it responds to ink-stamping, or being put through a digita lprinter. Everybody was so gracious about making this a didactic, educational experience for the students as well as an intense production period. At MICA, and I know for Hand Papermaking readers as well, function and craftsmanship are very important. The craftsmanship on this project is at the highest level, with various kinds and degrees of experience coming together. In this short, one-week period, how did you organize over 20 people to make Healing Man?We created many teams: the painting team; the digital printing team; the ink-stampers; the plate-makers; the plate printers; the collage and curating team; the tail-printing team……within the teams, we also had specialists, such as the two “heart girls” who worked out, even before I came down, how to paint the heart. Someone else became the “vein person” and there were a few people whom we called the “thin, red line people.” There was also the logistics team which set up the printmaking department in a larger space where we could stay put for the entire week. We needed both horizontal and vertical space to work on the giant kite, both flat on the table, and positioned up in the air with backlighting so we would have a sense of what it would look like up in the sky. Clockwise this page: Deery hand-coloring Healing Man; Deery, Bannister, Skinner, Ray Allen (MICA academic dean), and Dill with Divide Light #1 and #2 and Divide Light (Healing Man) in-progress; sparred Healing Man; Skinner attaching braided ropes; Skinner splitting bamboo. As we were printing away, we were greatly anticipating Scott’s arrival. Our biggest collaborator in this project is the sky, and we were waiting for our midwife to come…[Laughter]…and this affected the aesthetic positioning of the kite. That leads me to my next question. As you sit here and visualize Healing Man, which is in the other room, do you see him high in the sky, ethereal, light behind him, dancing on the wind? Do you see him in the studio with its tangible, beautiful paper that you can touch? Or do you see him in a gallery setting where hundreds of people can look at this artwork? I keep thinking of the moment it takes flight. That is always what I keep in mind when I am making any kite. The moment it takes flight, and ideally behaves the way I want it to, that is the moment; then it is a kite. Emily Dickinson said “Exhilaration—is within— / There can no Outer Wine / So royally intoxicate…” There is that moment that I think you’re talking about, the lift of exhilaration that we all feel when we get an idea, when we fall in love……and it is a climax, because after that, if everything works, then it is sort of boring. [Laughter.] There will be moments afterwards when the light shifts or the environment changes, or maybe when someone else flies the kite, but that moment that it lifts, there’s nothing like it—it is really exhilarating. We want to recreate a feeling of that moment in the gallery space. The kite has many layers of decipherability. Some things you will see through the sky, especially the outline which is so important. Then you’ll see the heart, and then, the writing. There are also smaller things that can be discovered when the kite is in a more intimate setting, so what we tried to do was to create an enormous range of visual nourishment. What better place to unveil Healing Man than MICA’s new Brown Center which is all glass and light. I can’t think of a more appropriate place to present the kite, high up near the ceiling, with light coming through it. It will look as though it were flying. The completion of the project takes place when Healing Man is actually flying and in another sense when it is exhibited and the public gets to see it and respond to it. I think the end result of any work of art is wonder. We have been so immersed in the production that we don’t know…is it going to work? Is it going to be a mish-mash of 24 people going in different directions? Or were we able to pull together like a team of horses to make something special? What ultimately ends up happening, and did happen here, is that we started to call the kite a “he.” He doesn’t want that; no, that’s too strong a red for his needs… and when that change started to occur, when he became alive, then we knew we created a work of art. Now, when we put him up in the sky—the biggest space of all, talk about a gallery space, the sky is ceiling and abyss at the same time—he will emerge, become, and that’s wonder Lesley Dill, Divide Light (Healing Man), 2006, 120 x 115 inches, giclee, photopolymer, stamp printing on Japanese handmade kozo paper with jute and bamboo. Produced by Hand Papermaking, Inc. at Dolphin Press & Print/Maryland Institute College of Art with support from The Drachen Foundation and Hiromi Paper International. Photo: Dan Meyers. Hand Papermaking is honored to present this special “tip-in,” a miniature kite by Lesley Dill, commissioned for the magazine’s twentieth-anniversary issue. Divide Light (DoubleGirls) is the Alice in-Wonderland, miniature-scale, companion piece to Divide Light (Healing Man), the giant, ten-foot kite presented earlier in this issue.“ I wanted to add a female element—twice,” observed Dill. “The archetypal idea of twinship is based on the dual nature of light: light and dark, the sun and moon, a twinning of consciousness.” The artist and Hand Papermaking wish to acknowledge The Drachen Foundation for its technical assistance in aerodynamically engineering Divide Light (DoubleGirls) and for its generosity in the production of the miniature kite tip-in. To assemble and fly Divide Light (DoubleGirls), please remove the kite from the glassine envelope and follow the instructions below. There is a diagrammatic drawing enclosed for your reference. Instructions You will need:• Scissors and/or X-acto knife• Glue stick• Lightweight (standard) sewing thread, preferably orange or red To assemble the kite:• Accurately cut out the figure just on the outside of outermost lines.• Cut out the rectangle marked “piece to attach flying line (thread)” which is printed under the right figure.• Cut the slit (solid line) between two figures’ heads, as indicated.• Cut out the paper between the two figures’ thighs; discard.• To add color, use pencil, pastel, or a medium that will not soak the paper.• Fold the kite in half lengthwise, (so hands meet) with the printed side out.• Overlap heads with shaded area behind to create wedge shape. Apply glue lightly to shaded area so that you form slightly cupped heads with image side out. To attach line and tail:• For the flying line, glue one end of sewing thread (3 feet in length) to the center of the printed side of rectangular tab.• Glue tab (thread-side down) to printed side of figures at matching area with the thread extending out the top towards the heads.• Use another piece of thread approximately 2 feet in length to make a loop tail by attaching each end to the non-printed side of paper at figures’ outer toes on each side. To fly the kite:• Fly indoors only.• Before flying, re-crease along the center fold. (Keep printed side of figures out.) The top of the kite should have a 120-degree angle, the bottom an 80-degree angle.• Hold the end of the 3-feet flying line, extend your arm and walk slowly, allowing the kite to take flight. The printed side of the kite should be facing you. It will lift slowly. Don’t block the airflow with your body.• The kite should fly stably, about 30 degrees above your hand. If the kite flies too high, and side to side, walk more slowly. If the kite hangs or drags, walk a bit faster. Canon inkjet printing on kozo digital printing paper provided by Hiromi Paper International.