I figured, why bother making paper when I can buy it? But one day I got curious and took a basic papermaking workshop. In touching, coloring, and forming the wet pulp I had an almost instant reaction. I was plugged in to my earliest artistic instincts of tactility and play. Infinite possibilities for paper flew through my head. I had found my medium and I was addicted!    I dove into hand papermaking, eventually printing monotypes on pulp-painted paper. After mounting a number of shows with these works I reached an impasse. I would begin something then abandon it, or finish it but not be satisfied. Something was not right. I was stifled by a barrage of paralyzing inner voices requiring me to work in a set and predetermined way.    "Growing Wild," a phase in my work that began in 1997 and culminated in an exhibit with the same name, emerged after this long period of attempting to legislate my art. One day, in desperation, I decided to listen to a craving, an impulse to touch materials. I began to take things I had collected, off the streets and out in the woods, and join them together in different ways. I tried to bring forth my ideas before I could reason with them. I wanted my process to be unwieldy, to follow through on sudden impulses. I began chasing darting thoughts: twist that wire to that piece of weed; take that handful of pine cones and wrap them together. I would follow an idea for as long as it took me and then set it aside. I was on a new, open path to artmaking.   I began to increase the variety of materials I used, by scavenging the city streets. When walking to my studio or riding my bicycle I would look for anything intriguing. The search became part of my new creative practice. The goal was to pick up anything that sounded a gong before my hesitation, fear, or laziness could squelch my instincts. I picked up corroded metal, weeds, vines, bark, spent Christmas trees, mashed match books, chewed up plastic, rusted bottle caps, rotting string. What appeared as garbage to some, appeared to me as a potential for transformation. Something in their essence attracted me: a gesture in a tree pod, a rhythm in an abandoned piece of wire, the speckled colors in a scrap of torn roofing. They almost called to me. A branch that has been crushed by days of street traffic speaks: "I might be a wing," or "I'm an insect part." Crumpled wire might say, "I'm lively. Take me. I could be something." I began carrying around extra plastic bags wherever I went to hold my new-found garbage, my new art supplies, my bundles of potential energy.   Collecting was a new way to be open, to allow my intuition to be active. Sometimes the gathering was in the form of looking, during a walk in the park or a trip to the beach. I am drawn to the changing colors of leaves, flickering sunlight touching tree bark, the lace of worn shells. They are miracles: the webs made by tree branches and vines, the deep glowing blue of morning glory petals. I am moved by how things illuminate and glow. I study these things, I inhale them, I take photos in my mind (and sometimes with my camera). They are reference for later, not to copy but to extract and fuse into a new configuration.   In the studio another sort of collaboration with nature occurs when I make paper. I use the most basic of ingredients: water and abaca fiber. I process them in a Hollander beater to make a tough, skin-like paper that will be luminescent and rich in color when dry. I beat it for a long time so it will shrink as it dries. I invent all kinds of structures to guide the paper to dry in a particular way while still allowing it the freedom to contract and crinkle. When I return to the studio I am always surprised with the way the paper has changed form and intensified in color as it dried.   This process is also very painstaking. Sometimes I spend days preparing pulp, beating it in the Hollander until it reaches the right consistency. I carefully mix colors, thinking of specific hues I have seen in nature; vibrant, muted, mottled. I choose my palette and squirt the colored fibers through squeeze bottles onto base sheets. Or I suspend two colored pulps in a vat so that the sheets of paper are speckled with color, much like the texture of the pebbly roofing scraps I find on the street and the dappled yellow and red maple leaves of autumn.   My ideas evolve in such an unexpected, intuitive way that their source is not easy to locate. In hindsight I can pinpoint several approaches that trigger ideas for my sculptures. Often I roam around my studio, glancing at the collections of things I have catalogued in clear plastic bins, Zip Lock bags, large piles on tables. I wonder how a particular piece might look with something formed from paper pulp. I imagine, perhaps, rust-colored abaca paper tendrils sprouting out of a piece of metal. I make them. Sometimes it works the opposite way around: I take a dry, sculpted paper form, a remnant from a failed idea, and search my studio for its mate.   Other times paper plays no part in this hybridizing process. I notice how two found items are linked in a particular way. I see how they are family and wonder how they would look if joined. The thick piece of reddish brown root is linked in color to a circular piece of lacy, rusted metal. What if the root was growing out of the metal? I glue them together and it works. I have married them, bred them. A new species is born! The results make me laugh.   Often I try joining disparate materials just to see if they will talk to each other. Together corn kernels and aluminum wire mesh become live beings. The corn is white and translucent, glowing like pearly teeth. When I finally look at the piece I wonder why these materials ever met in one spot? It is as if a language or message has slipped out through my fingertips.   Sometimes pictures appear in my head when I work or as I drift off to sleep. I sketch these images onto paper for safekeeping. And often I have had drawing spells in which I scratch out image after image, creating piles of paper covered with dense, previously unknown worlds of plants and insect-like creatures. They are part mystery, part semi-conscious composites from my internal catalogue of nature photos. I then refer directly to these drawings when constructing a specific neo-botanic being out of paper pulp.   And, if I have no particular idea, I know I can rely on thinking through my hands. I find my spiritual center there. Visual images pop into my head. I translate them and work through the touching. The act of making paper, twisting, tearing, and pressing the torn pieces into new shapes becomes an active meditation, an entrance into a place of mental peace where my visual thinking emerges and often surprises me.   As I began working in this new way, I would take completed pieces and randomly pin them to the wall, set them on the floor, or hang them from the ceiling. No outward aesthetic eye guided their placement. I had only a practical interest in getting a particular piece out of my way so I could move on to the next idea. Later I began to notice that some areas of my studio were becoming dense with stuff, other areas more spacious and airy. These independent microcosms were unexpectedly multiplying into ecosystems in the midst of transformation: growing, decaying, erupting, gestating, dying, unfolding, spinning, resting. Together they were at once wild and random, and uniquely ordered. A new form of nature was growing in my studio.   Based on this phenomena in the studio I now install my sculptures with the intention of cultivating an environment. I begin placing the sculptures in the room, rearranging them until I find the right niche or community for every piece. I build these spaces to be as wild and unpredictable as nature itself � teeming with swooping, whirling, quivering, and hovering hives, nests, invented plants and insect beings, exoskeletons, webs, cocoons, and carcasses.   And now I realize, I too have unexpectedly grown wild! I have unleashed something powerful, intuitive, and exuberant inside of me. While listening to wordless ideas and indescribable hunches and collaborating with the high shrinking abaca paper and my scavenged materials, I have landed somewhere new. It is a process that now sustains me though I do not know where it is going to take me. But one thing I am sure of, I am back in the woods. I am in the right place.    ***************   I am curious to try making paper from straw, not a pristine paper but some kind of evolving raw pulp in the midst of emerging from plant into paper. I have promised to show students in my beginning papermaking class how to do it. But here in the heart of New York City it is not a simple task to find straw.   I track down a man, Chris, at the horse stables near my home in Brooklyn. Here, amidst pavement and endless rows of brick apartment buildings is a tiny snatch of land and I have been transported to the country. There is hay all over, it smells of horse manure and urine, and everyone walks around in heavy boots. They smell like horses, too, and they do not dress for success. They talk about Bessie and Honor Boy, and how Brownie didn't eat her oats today. There is something comforting and real about being here.   I climb up to the hay loft. Chris picks out a bale and throws it down. He gives it to me, not for a price but just to be neighborly. This is a different country! By now my clothes are filled with dust. My shoes are mucky with bits of horse manure, with its remnants of undigested grass. I set the bale in my car and drive to my studio.   I soak the straw, cook it, rinse it, and then beat it into a pulp. Two days later I finally form sheets of paper. I scoop wads of it into my hands and begin to sculpt it. Visual ideas start to bubble up in my head�hives and plants and cocoon-like forms I have never quite seen before. All at once, I am in the country, in my sandbox, in my studio. I am alive, making my art on a little spot in New York City. I am here creating my own special country.    ***********************   I am an artist, traveling to an art residency in a New York City elementary school. It is pouring rain, windy. I plod along the street, weighed down with shopping bags filled with art supplies. I just want to get there already. My arms are hurting.   And then I pass an unusually large, abandoned, wind-torn umbrella. Its gesture is beautiful. Its long handle is curved � a stalk bending with the wind. Groups of uprooted wires let loose, leaving behind a memory of the power and direction of the force that broke its spines. The entire piece leans to one side like a willowy dancer swaying her arms. It has a rhythm to it. I know it is the beginning of a wonderful sculpture. And then I say to myself, "Yeah, right. Carry this ganglion of metal through the crowded streets on this miserably wet, cold day? I've got too much already." So I let the beauty pass, which is not my policy. Laziness is not a reason for passing up a valuable piece of potential artwork.   I am an artist and I have a job to do. In the classroom questions from lively, demanding third graders bombard me as we fold and glue paper. Finally I pack up to go. I have left the art supplies at the school for the next day's lesson. I walk out again into the dark, rainy day dreaming and happy to be heading home, my arms free and swinging.   Several blocks from the subway I see my torn-up umbrella. It is still waiting for me. It is wet and dirty, its metal arms sticking every which way. Awkward as it is, I pick it up this time. It is part of my job as an artist. I climb into the subway, umbrella in tow. People give me funny stares. They keep looking. I am careful that the spines do not poke anyone. I know they are wondering, "Why does she have that wrecked umbrella? It's useless! It's junk!" Can I tell them, "Look! Look at this beauty, its sway. It's alive."? Can I tell them, "Look, I'm an artist. I'm here, doing my job."?