Benglis's decades of working with handmade paper began in collaboration with Lynn Forgach of Exeter Press and Paper, New York in 1978. Forgach approached Benglis, suggesting that the material of paper pulp might fit well with Benglis's work. Benglis was making bronze sculpture at that time. To start, Forgach used Benglis's bronzes to produce rubber molds, backed with plaster mother-mold supports, in order to cast paper pulp into the molds. Their first castings were done at Benglis's studio in the Clocktower, a legendary gallery and studio space in Lower Manhattan. The paper forms, titled Lagniappe, are iconic, richly colored, and embellished with unusual materials. I asked Benglis what color means in her work. She described her first memory of consciously noticing color when as a child she was given colored construction paper. They were saturated hues; the isolated, individual colors amazed her. It was a revelation to her that it was possible to separate color out of the environment. The isolation of the hues in sheets of paper in a pure state sparked a feeling that she could work freely with pure color. She did not have to hold back. She could use pure red! In 2013–2014, Benglis and I collaborated on a series of paper pieces titled Bull Path. She splashed the pieces with gold leaf and bold strokes of deep coal black, red, blue, and yellow. I told her that some pieces make me think of the pattern of harlequin costumes. Benglis agreed with the analogy, and added that her use of color was similar to drumming in music. The color creates rhythm. Metallic additions are also constant elements in Benglis's work adding to the rhythmic impulse in her pieces. She has a love of metal's physicality, metal's ability to reflect light and catch attention. I began working with Benglis in the spring of 2011 at the Brodsky Center at Rutgers University where I am master papermaker. Chicken-wire mesh has been a steady component of our collaborations to date. Benglis shapes and cinches chickenwire mesh, and I cover the forms with fresh, wet sheets of abaca pulp. Benglis told me how her father had building supplies, and that as a child she would wander through them, fascinated by their potential to make something new. For our first project we carefully removed the dried paper from the cinched wire forms which would become altered by the torque and tension of the drying abaca paper. Benglis then finished the pieces by painting the paper surfaces with coal tempera, shellac, and phosphorescent paint. In 2012 I collaborated independently with Benglis at the Eric Hauser Foundation, in Rottweil, Germany, where she was invited to make work and mount a solo exhibition. We followed a similar process, but this time for the works Schmetterling 1, 2, and 3, Benglis only partially covered the chicken-wire forms so that the whisper-thin paper hung as delicate remnants, as though the majority of the form had been stripped bare. A few sparse phosphorescent brushstrokes completed the work. In 2013, we worked on another independent collaboration at her Cerrillos, New Mexico studio to create thirteen 3-foot-tall Panasco, 2012, 26¾ x 14½ x 8¼ inches, handmade paper, paint, shellac, phosphorescence. Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read, New York. Prey Being, 2001, 73 x 20 x 8 inches diameter, aluminum wire coils, covered with translucent abaca paper, pigment. Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donne Papermill, New York. Brother Animals, 2001, 70 x 15 x 4 inches diameter, aluminum wire coils, covered with translucent abaca paper, pigment. Courtesy of the artist and Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. summer 2015 - 5 to 7-foot-tall totems of cinched wire forms covered with thick sheets of abaca handmade paper. In the dry desert air the texture of the paper became actively reticulated. Benglis has been painting these surfaces, slowly over the months. Some pieces have taken a greater accumulation of paint and others have just a mark here or there. As of this writing the artist continues to react to the surface with paint. Lynda Benglis has worked with or on handmade paper at a number of studios. In the 1980s she produced monoprints on handmade paper with Garner Tullis. In 2000, she completed a series of monotypes on cast-relief handmade paper at Mixographia. And in 2001, Benglis was commissioned by Dieu Donné Papermill to create a special series for the studio's twentyfifth- anniversary exhibition "Rags to Riches." Benglis worked in collaboration with Megan Moorhouse, Lee Running, and Mina Takahashi to make the Game Being series of coiled wire covered with wet sheets of overbeaten, translucent, flesh-colored, pigmented abaca paper. Once they dried, Benglis assembled the forms, crushing and hand manipulating them into strange configurations to relate to the wall "as if they are living, or have lived, and are but skeletal images of their past and unknown existence."2 In 2011 while in Ahmedabad, India, Benglis painted a series of drawings on paper handmade at the Ghandi Ashram. She tiled them into a grid, forming a large, sculptural work, with her imagery of marks dancing over them. In 2015, the Hepworth Wakefield Museum in Yorkshire, England, presents the first exhibition of Benglis's more recent works Unpainted handmade paper forms, in progress, at the Benglis Studio, Cerrillos, New Mexico, August 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Anne McKeown. in handmade paper. The paper sculpture will stand in the company of her other works in polyurethane, wax, bronze, and ceramics. Recurring imagery in her work—the human torso, fans, knots, accretions, figurative landscape abstractions—will appear in a range of materials. "I have not said everything yet" about this imagery, Lynda Benglis declared. "I need to make more, more, more."3 ___________ notes 1. Bill Shearman, "Story of a Sculptor," American Press, LIFE section (Lake Charles, LA), November 10, 2013. 2. Lynda Benglis, quoted in Donna Stein's essay, "Technics and Creativity in Contemporary Papermaking," in Rags to Riches: 25 Years of Paper Art from Dieu Donné Papermill (New York: Dieu Donné Papermill, 2001), 42. Published in conjunction with traveling exhibition of the same name. 3. All quotes and statements by Lynda Benglis are from interviews, conversations, and correspondence with the author in 2011 through 2014

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