And of course India is a country that makes paper, unbelievable paper. Paper and cloth are used a great deal in the spiritual traditions: deities are wrapped; prayer flags release words into the wind; you write prayers and hopes on little pieces of paper that you attach to trees, that you put in bowls, that you burn.   In many ways, my work with paper increasingly paralleled the entire metaphor with which I make my work, which is about language and image. Spoken language happens in the air between people. So, prayer flags, written language that's burnt—these imply language and the soft, tactile surfaces that hold it. Language is then returned to the air, much like spoken language. This implies the utter belief in spoken language.   AR: The content of breath, it seems like you're saying.   LD: Yes, language is the intention of breath. Interview with Lesley Dill Arlene Raven   Arlene Raven: Tell me how you started with paper.   Lesley Dill: Living in India for almost two years began my relationship with paper. What is the process of falling in love? Is it immediate magnetism to a person, place, or material? Or is it something that starts out in a serendipitous, accidental way, and then gradually becomes interwoven with your life and you can't imagine living without it? Accidental couplings, like myself with India and with paper, often lead to a long-standing connection.   And of course India is a country that makes paper, unbelievable paper. Paper and cloth are used a great deal in the spiritual traditions: deities are wrapped; prayer flags release words into the wind; you write prayers and hopes on little pieces of paper that you attach to trees, that you put in bowls, that you burn.   In many ways, my work with paper increasingly paralleled the entire metaphor with which I make my work, which is about language and image. Spoken language happens in the air between people. So, prayer flags, written language that's burnt—these imply language and the soft, tactile surfaces that hold it. Language is then returned to the air, much like spoken language. This implies the utter belief in spoken language.   AR: The content of breath, it seems like you're saying.   LD Sometimes I think I am paper. I see myself as frontal, flat, and wide into space. Like a blank piece of paper, I'm initially pre-linguistic and represent a world of inner life and silence. I wait to be imprinted on, or to reveal myself in language.   As a material to work with, paper is the closest medium to air that I can still touch. I love its fragility and implications of violence. It rips, tears, and crumbles.   AR: Artists enjoy a certain level of violence.   LD: Yes, but paper can always be mended. It can be sewn back together, glued, and remade.   There's an obsessive quality to how you use paper in artwork. When you make it, that's obsessive as well. I find this obsessiveness soothing; it marks time.   I see the world as a sheet of paper. I wear glasses, so that flattens the seen world for me. In a parallel way, I recently went to the newly opened planetarium in New York.      It really interested me, as I was zoomed through the space show, that our galaxies and nebulae are actually on planes. They are flat. This abyss and infinity of space is not just filled with volume but planes, aligned and pressured through gravity.   And we are like that. We are pressured into the form of our lives. We are flattened but also opened, widened out by our experiences.   AR: I want to ask you something a little bit different about paper. Your poem suit. I remember that you told me you looked at it and it wasn't enough; it needed words. I'm wondering about the relationship between paper as a ground and the words put on it, and how that makes something more.   LD: I think we are a linguistic culture. We are very much about what is said and what is not said. As a child I had a lot of colds and illnesses and spent time reading. From an early age I read six to eight books a week. My mind was filled with stories and images held by imprinted paper. So this kind of world, this world of fictional unfolding held in books, in paper, is very real to me. When I walk into a room I can smell where the books are.   My first time in India I was delighted when my friends stained my hands and feet orange with designs of henna (mendhi). It made me like a book.    AR: How did it make you like a book?   LD: We hold unrevealed language inside ourselves. When I returned to New York, I began painting people with poetry—Emily Dickinson's—thinking of language as an invisible tattoo, staining from the unspoken words inside us through to the outside.   My favorite writers are Dickinson, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, Rilke, Neruda, Henry James, Salvador Espriu. I like writers who evoke the broken elegance of life. Henry James, for example, will present a deliberately constructed situation. Then someone will move their head in a certain way, or say a word that's slightly off, and it tears the fabric of the entire context. His subtle tearing has the impact of a punch. In my photograph, Dreamer, which relates to a Rilke poem, the placing of the fingertips on the eyes is delicate, intimate, but potentially invasive.   I'd paint words on people—friends and volunteers—and then I'd photograph them. I've been doing photography for eleven years now and am attracted to it      because it literally makes a human being into a piece of paper. It makes them frontal. It makes for a single reading. All the information you're getting is from one side. You're not getting side B or side C or side D; only side A.   To emphasize the wrinkled, lived-life aspect of paper, I soak and rub all of the layers of paper off a photographic print until the last thin one that holds the emulsion. It reminds me of Asian paper. I work back into it with paint, and wax, and thread. A photograph is a piece of paper stained by light. It's a conduit of evanescence.   AR: Picture for us the project that you did in India, what you did with the paper and how that evolved in your work.    LD: I would take thin Asian paper and dip it in tea, then let it dry in the sun. Then I would throw tea on it, separately, once it had dried, so that it would make stains. I love staining.   For many years I made paper suits and dresses thinking of them as skin surrogates. I'd embroider them with horsehair and also stain them with tea. I thought if you put all our different skin colors in a blender, they'd come out tea-colored. The stains, creases, and sewing mark time and replicate our daily emotional experience of being touched, soothed, pinched, caressed, and bruised.   I also like the soft physicality of working with paper. It's a very living, in-the-moment process. As a material you bring it very close into your body as you work. I rip it, cast it, shrink it, cut it, add to it.    I have found, as artists, we all have different muscles and parts of our bodies that we use. Some people are body artists, using their whole bodies: they weld, they use chain saws. Others are arm-artists: they do things that use their arms from their shoulders.   AR: Some are finger artists!   LD: Yes. And paper calls upon fingertip energy in terms of how you touch it and how you become sensitized to it. It's very sensual and has an immediate responsiveness that calls for careful handling.   AR: There's a connection with writers, who also use fingers. I'm definitely a finger person. I like my mind to float and my fingers to be busy.       LD: It's like playing an instrument.   AR: Exactly, and something comes from it.   LD: You produce from that brain-hand connection. It's a coordination that sets something free.   I grew up in Maine and the Adirondacks; my father was a biology teacher and my grandfather had a tree farm outside of Boston. We walked in the woods a lot. In a way, when you work with paper, you're really working with trees, bark, and plants. You're working with deconstructed nature, natural cells. Working with paper is my home, as if the sense of my childhood is pulled into my present. I grew up in Maine and the Adirondacks; my father was a biology teacher and my grandfather had a tree farm outside of Boston. We walked in the woods a lot. In a way, when you work with paper, you're really working with trees, bark, and plants. You're working with deconstructed nature, natural cells. Working with paper is my home, as if the sense of my childhood is pulled into my present.    AR: Can you talk about your artist book? AR: Can you talk about your artist book?    LD: Yes. The Thrill Came Slowly. I did this with Peter Kruty; Helen Frederick of Pyramid Atlantic initiated the project. Peter is a real artist, dedicated to getting things right. Each page was printed, worked, reworked, printed. LD: Yes. The Thrill Came Slowly. I did this with Peter Kruty; Helen Frederick of Pyramid Atlantic initiated the project. Peter is a real artist, dedicated to getting things right. Each page was printed, worked, reworked, printed.    I wanted to make a naked book, a book without a cover. I tried to reduce it to the essence of a book—paper, image, and text—and to make it as light as possible. It's made from Japanese silk tissue. I love this paper because it's originally a mending paper. There's something very appealing and soothing about working all day with paper called that. I wanted to make a naked book, a book without a cover. I tried to reduce it to the essence of a book—paper, image, and text—and to make it as light as possible. It's made from Japanese silk tissue. I love this paper because it's originally a mending paper. There's something very appealing and soothing about working all day with paper called that.    AR: And something very female.AR: And something very female.    LD: Of course, female. I wanted this book to be image- and intuition-driven rather than text-driven. I want you to see the image first and then relate it to the language that's underneath. LD: Of course, female. I wanted this book to be image- and intuition-driven rather than text-driven. I want you to see the image first and then relate it to the language that's underneath.    AR: Do you think there's a narrative in this book? AR: Do you think there's a narrative in this book?    LD: No one's ever asked me that. We kept shifting around images, putting them one in front of the other, and suddenly it seemed to have a sequence, a story arc. But I don't know if I can put it in words. LD: No one's ever asked me that. We kept shifting around images, putting them one in front of the other, and suddenly it seemed to have a sequence, a story arc. But I don't know if I can put it in words.    You turn the page and you can see something underneath. That's the way language is. It mimics a process that we take for granted: once someone says one word you assume that two or three are coming after it. I wanted the reader to be able to see that literally. I wanted this to be totally book essence, totally transparent. I didn't want to be tricky. I wanted to subtly keep the reader interested in turning the pages, to see what happens. You turn the page and you can see something underneath. That's the way language is. It mimics a process that we take for granted: once someone says one word you assume that two or three are coming after it. I wanted the reader to be able to see that literally. I wanted this to be totally book essence, totally transparent. I didn't want to be tricky. I wanted to subtly keep the reader interested in turning the pages, to see what happens.    AR: Dreamer, the title of one of your pieces, seems like a central word for you. It seems like your vision, and that has to do with eyesight. You've done some actual eye pieces.AR: Dreamer, the title of one of your pieces, seems like a central word for you. It seems like your vision, and that has to do with eyesight. You've done some actual eye pieces.    LD: Many. LD: Many.    AR: And you've told me about getting your eyeballs massaged in India. But I think it goes back further, a kind of objective reality as artwork: how the eye and identity relate.AR: And you've told me about getting your eyeballs massaged in India. But I think it goes back further, a kind of objective reality as artwork: how the eye and identity relate.    LD: Dreaming is the one time when we are quietly allowed to go totally insane; where things are able to totally not make sense. When we wake up, we have some memory of the dream; sometimes it fades and goes away, and sometimes it stays with us through the day. So, we have dreaming, waking up, and then being awake. We have underneath the consciousness, LD: Dreaming is the one time when we are quietly allowed to go totally insane; where things are able to totally not make sense. When we wake up, we have some memory of the dream; sometimes it fades and goes away, and sometimes it stays with us through the day. So, we have dreaming, waking up, and then being awake. We have underneath the consciousness,        intermediary consciousness, and then the waking consciousness. In dreaming, you have a thought that's frequently accompanied by an image, behind your eyes. When you make art or speak the image, I think the image actually comes up to the level of your eyeball. Then the pupils of the eye release the images out into the eye. We then have inside the eye, the surface of the eye, and then the release of it. intermediary consciousness, and then the waking consciousness. In dreaming, you have a thought that's frequently accompanied by an image, behind your eyes. When you make art or speak the image, I think the image actually comes up to the level of your eyeball. Then the pupils of the eye release the images out into the eye. We then have inside the eye, the surface of the eye, and then the release of it.     I get visual ideas that line up like Boeing 707s, with a great deal of pressure on the surface of my eye. This is only released when I can make art, in a sketch or in actually making a work. The insight is layered with desire and the desire is fulfilled in art. I get visual ideas that line up like Boeing 707s, with a great deal of pressure on the surface of my eye. This is only released when I can make art, in a sketch or in actually making a work. The insight is layered with desire and the desire is fulfilled in art.    It's the same with speaking: we have words unspoken inside of us, then they come up to awareness, right behind our lips where they're held. And often they're not let out, they're often just held behind our lips, but sometimes we speak them. We're aware of the sensitivity, the skin of the lips, and then we let the words out. Sometimes we shout them, or we may leak them out or they kind of exhale out. It's the same with speaking: we have words unspoken inside of us, then they come up to awareness, right behind our lips where they're held. And often they're not let out, they're often just held behind our lips, but sometimes we speak them. We're aware of the sensitivity, the skin of the lips, and then we let the words out. Sometimes we shout them, or we may leak them out or they kind of exhale out.    This is what reading does. You have a closed book and you know something is in there. You open the book and start to read. At first you just see black symbols against a white page. As you read, you get inside the words and they make pictures in your head. You're inside the book. You close the book and keep whatever you keep and go back to your life. This is like dreaming, seeing, speaking. So, we are all books. This is what reading does. You have a closed book and you know something is in there. You open the book and start to read. At first you just see black symbols against a white page. As you read, you get inside the words and they make pictures in your head. You're inside the book. You close the book and keep whatever you keep and go back to your life. This is like dreaming, seeing, speaking. So, we are all books.     AR: Can you tell me about your current project? AR: Can you tell me about your current project?    LD: Right now I'm working towards an exhibit in the fall, at George Adams Gallery. It's going to be mostly cast and worked paper sculpture. In this new work, working with paper is my uncertain passage toward a realized image. I cannot bear a cast as a normal figure. I recoil at the animal recognition of a similar object that takes up space. So I keep fiddling and changing things. Making things smaller, making them bigger. Even though I'm doing it in real time and space, I want it to be an image of the mind. The way a photograph is an image of the mind, or a performance leaves a residue in the mind. LD: Right now I'm working towards an exhibit in the fall, at George Adams Gallery. It's going to be mostly cast and worked paper sculpture. In this new work, working with paper is my uncertain passage toward a realized image. I cannot bear a cast as a normal figure. I recoil at the animal recognition of a similar object that takes up space. So I keep fiddling and changing things. Making things smaller, making them bigger. Even though I'm doing it in real time and space, I want it to be an image of the mind. The way a photograph is an image of the mind, or a performance leaves a residue in the mind.    AR: And the way a person is a piece of paper, really.AR: And the way a person is a piece of paper, really.    LD: That's right. And the way we are our own images of our own minds.