British-born Lilian Bell, a conceptual artist, became fascinated by objects made of paper: books, kites, fans, and "spirit paper" burnt at Chinese funerals. By 1976 she was involved in book works and began teaching herself to make paper. Two years later she traveled to Japan to study the papermaking process. She has taken conscious care to avoid the Japanese aesthetic and the seduction of beautiful paper. Bell is more concerned with ideas generated by the art object than with its pleasing appearance. Bell's At, On and Under the Table, a tripartite installation, is "a series of staged presentations," first exhibited in 1990. Tables are the primary metaphor in this highly abstracted, socio-political work. Bell writes "...the table is a symbol that represents the negotiating stage where we try to reach agreements, play games of chance and war, and endeavor to acquire knowledge." Chairs, photographs, and faxed material are additional props, but illusionistic cast paper pulp rocks--multiples built over a Styrofoam core--and cast architectural fragments are the most dynamic elements in Bell's constructions. The card tables and folding chairs are real, though they are decorated with paper, in white and a saturated Yves Klein-type blue. Bell likes to modify the table structure with unexpected additions, such as a wavy strip of blue attached to one leg. She props photographs on some chairs. They are pictures taken of the same installation in earlier incarnations, pictures of similar chairs with her illusionistic paper "rocks" on them in outdoor settings, for example. The pictures are an effective distancing device which points up paradoxes about the nature of perceived reality and the interweaving of past and present. Like clouds and sea seen from space, blue and white on the table surfaces suggest a global arena, with rocks perhaps functioning as miniature continents. This reading suggests both ecological issues and political machinations in which human lives are of small consequence. Aside from a bright cobalt blue, Bell has tended to restrict herself to gray, black, and white, which emphasize stark communication over the emotional appeal of color, though she says her current work is becoming more color oriented. At the Negotiating Table: A Strange Geography of Chance is a table on which cast paper "rock" or "concrete" slabs with right angled edges suggest the urban environment in Bell's formal vocabulary. The adjacent table, entitled On the Table: Stratagems and Surrogates includes a cast of a classical architectural frieze, a kind of historicity. Perhaps the most memorable of the three linked works is Under the Table: Affairs of State, in which small rocks rest on top of the table while in the shadows under it a huge boulder lurks. "Simulation," Bell has written, "is based on the art of deception, yet both the artist and the observer is completely aware of these ambiguities and are willing partners in the deception!" The duplication of heavy things like rocks in a lightweight material like paper is clearly ironic. The sinister boulder concealed under the table is not as weighty as it appears. On the other hand, Bell speaks of the "seeming fragility" of paper; so, perhaps the boulder represents an obstacle which, though lightweight, may be paradoxically tough and resilient. "Paper continues to be the backbone of civilization and culture: even with new technological tools like the fax machine it is still an essential component in the duplicating and transmission of ideas and images," Bell said in a 1991 invitation to participate in one of numerous international fax projects she has organized. On yet another table, Bell's Does God Play Dice: Earth Summit and the Power Behind the Throne, which employs paper as the most traditional of messengers, includes sheaves of faxes for viewers' inspection. Bell's simultaneous commitment to "fakes" and to communication plunges the viewer into some of the essential ambiguities of perception without offering easy solutions. Lesley Dill New Yorker Lesley Dill has written, "How nice to slip inside words, the meaning and shape of some emotion you're feeling, and go out in life. To look inside your closet and find the right fit..." She takes this metaphor literally; both by fashioning clothing of paper stamped with text and by finding a source of words--the poetry of Emily Dickinson--which is a perfect fit for her art. She was drawn to Dickinson's poems "for their embodiment of psychological states of despair and euphoria," but Dill's works are more than parrotings or illustrations. The artist is more concerned with "knit[ting] the poem into the emotional metaphor of [the sculptures'] separate personae," than with creating objects designed to be read. A particular poem is not necessarily completely visible and legible on Dill's wall-mounted, loosely basted paper garments. The artist provides a separate sheet containing the entire texts of the poems referenced, freeing viewers to experience the work in a direct way without having to decipher all of the words and puzzle over their source. Large Paper Poem Dress is two garments hung side by side, crudely stamped with words in blue ink on thin, Japanese-style chiri paper. The dresses are mostly flat, but with gathered skirts. Narrow seamed ribbons of paper extend from shoulders and bodices as if to tie the dresses to the body. It is interesting to notice how Dickinson herself frequently makes reference to both clothing and language. In the poem related to this work, the poet uses words like "veil," "gauze," "alphabet," and "printed." Dill fashions paper into metaphors which expand on Dickinson's poems. Paper Poem Gloves, which are narrow and much too long to wear, tell us, "I am afraid to own a Body - / I am afraid to own a Soul -..." suggesting that the body and soul do not fit an owner for whom "possession [is] not optional." Further, hands which could wear these fragile poetic gloves would be too small to grasp "precarious Property" effectively. And arms suitable to the accessories would be weak and unarticulated. In some ways the gloves are a portrait of Dickinson herself. With flimsy paper garments such as these, Dill echoes Dickinson's reiterated perception that the messages of the senses are too intense; they attack the body and soul. Similarly, Dill, with neat cutting, large even stitches and a spare blue and neutral palette evokes the poet's muted, ladylike demeanor and, with crude printing, her appealing frankness. Paper Poem Torso moves even further from the clear representation of words. The Torso is a small t-shirt-like garment, pinned high and flat on the wall, with coin-sized holes torn or burnt away where breasts would be. Streaky tea-colored stains mark these openings. From the hem of the garment descends a cascade of countless large paper letters cut out and linked with thread. It spills to the floor like the "Wine" and the "Ample Rhine" mentioned in the accompanying poem. Circulatory System is not a garment. This wall-mounted web of delicate tendrils is formed of paper pulp on a wire armature. The narrow cobalt blue lines trace a lacy sketch of a human heart and vascular system to illustrate the fragment: For each extatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivery ratio To the extasy. The paper words on the wall beside the web of blue are not a quote from this poem but, "The healed heart shows its shallow scar." Dill's linear sculpture has some of the qualities of a narrow, slightly keloidal scar, as if the whole circulatory system were a healing wound. Jeanne Jaffe Philadelphia sculptor Jeanne Jaffe eschews the common written word for a three dimensional, ideogramic language which we can almost intuitively apprehend. In her recent work, Jaffe's cast paper-pulp forms are all body-related. Some suggest internal things like bones, hearts, and other organs. Others are straightforward representations of feet or hands. A third category consists of surreal simplifications and juxtapositions of external forms complete in themselves. Their sleek symmetrical modernity is exemplified by a smooth featureless ovoid head with a creepy narrow "neck" resembling a pacifier nipple. This shape appears in different sizes and contexts. The most imposing is the huge metallic gold-painted Head (Eidetic Image) which was suspended from the ceiling of the gallery. Form Veil is also hung, in vertical strands with small shapes spaced regularly along their length. The linguistic element is particularly noticeable here where each unit of communication is on the same scale and is set, hieroglyph-like, into an approximate grid. As in a codified language, different types of forms suggest disparate symbolic elements. Jaffe has adorned many of these objects with hair, either blunt cut, like the bristles of a brush, or long trailing wisps. Two floor pieces move beyond the syntactical strategy and its sometimes disturbing references to the inner workings of the body. They, too, are unsettling. Seated Figure and Crouching Figure are placed in a corner, perhaps deliberately overshadowed by Head and the other hanging pieces. Neither Figure has a head and each is somehow robbed of autonomy by the generalization of the body and by the postures the artist has chosen. Seated Figure, with its attenuated arms held impotently against an asexual torso, looks like an overstuffed armchair. The foetal Crouching Figure at first glance resembles a kitsch representation of a dozing Mexican in a sombrero. But the strange disk-like shape framing its shoulders and knees, around which its arms are locked, is not a hat on a headless figure; it is more like a Chinese stock, a device of punishment and restraint. Jaffe began as a ceramist. She had to abandon that field in the mid-eighties because an accident made it difficult for her to work with heavy materials. She found the ideal lightweight malleable material in paper pulp, however she still uses clay to make the original positives from which plaster moulds are made. She casts a cotton and abaca mixture in two sections for each sculptural element and assembles and paints them. The potential for multiple elements makes a number of different arrangements possible. Jaffe thinks of her sculptural forms as a "pre-verbal vocabulary." She says: "It's about ways we construct images to carry thought and meanings and ideas rather than words. You have a sensation and you struggle to put it into words, but there's not a pre-existing form. We don't only exist in language; we exist in the body, in sensation, in intuition. I think people form thoughts visually." Regina Vater Regina Vater is well-known for her political art, which celebrates her native Brazilian culture and treats paper as a medium of communication. Her most striking installation at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery centered on a ceiling-high curtain composed of five long, machine-made paper strips covered with copies of tiny passport photographs of Brazilian citizens. Comigo Ninguem Pode (None Can Annihilate Me), the title of the installation, is also the Portuguese name for the supposedly indestructible dieffenbachia plant, used in this country and in Brazil as a house plant, although it is poisonous. Several are displayed in Vater's installations. She says that in Brazil, following an African tradition, these plants are placed near doorways as guardians against the evil eye. The installation Comigo Ninguem Pode, which Vater also relates to the Tree of Life, is based on African Brazilian myths about the gods taking human form wearing beaded veils --like the tiny photocopied head-shots. It is intended to celebrate the god-like strength of the Brazilian people. In a corner behind the veil of countless human faces, a dieffenbachia grows out of a heap of earth. Like the poor of Brazil, Vater is committed to using easily accessible materials. In Urbacion (Signboards), color xerography transforms photos of hand-painted advertising signs into playing cards. Vater invited visitors to the exhibition to compose these words into poems which they transcribed in a notebook. In Vide O Dolorido (a punning "Watch the Pain" or "Painful Video") Vater recreates a domestic vignette celebrating a black and white television set. The television shows a video Vater shot in the slums of Ipanema. On screen people talk about their lives (with subtitles) against a varied musical background. (The most ironic piece is Janice Joplin singing "O Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedez-Benz?") Emulating Brazilians who can barely afford black and white television, Vater has transformed the prized set into an altar with a cheap nylon doily, a plastic statuette of the Virgin, and a small dieffenbachia. She has also imitated the custom of turning black and white television into color by covering the monitor with colored cellophane, reproducing the three main colors of the Brazilian flag: yellow, green, and blue. These sculptors have ways of communicating which are both metaphoric and literal. Lilian Bell sees paper as a key to the worldwide exchange of ideas. Perception and politics are her main concerns. Lesley Dill is alert to the poetic richness of language and involved with clothing as a primary metaphor. She treats the work of art as a mirror for psychological states. Jeanne Jaffe fashions a new, three-dimensional system of symbols which speaks of archetypal inner states. And Regina Vater seeks to share the special myth and character of the Brazilian people. These four artists have different geographical origins and different aesthetic agendas, but all are deeply concerned with the nature of communication in the late 20th century and all have selected paper as a primary medium. ) See Flores, Juan Carlos, "The Death of the Icon: The Post-Modern Paper-Sculpture of Lilian A. Bell", Reflex, Volume 4 Number 3, March/April 1990, p. 14.

‍