One of the side effects of the Coronavirus was the huge number of face masks lying on the ground. In 2021, I saw the work of Drew Mattot on social media. He was making paper pulp mixed with disposable face masks. I contacted him for his authorization and replicated this work on a larger scale with my students: to make prints on papel corona.

I wondered how I could obtain the materials needed, and most importantly, how to train students who have never made paper before to produce a good printmaking paper. A short time later, there was a call for proposals for an Art and Sustainability competition from the Art & Culture Department at my university, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC Chile). I used this opportunity to gather a team from the art faculty and the medical school to work together on this idea. The medical faculty and students helped to sterilize the face mask material and contact the hospital to propose an exhibition of the prints on pandemic paper in their facilities. The arts faculty and students took part in the creative process and brought the art out of the gallery into an alternative place, the hospital, to present pandemic face masks with a different perspective. The group consisted of Professor Dr. Valentina Serrano MD, medical student Darko Radic, art students Vania Medina and Josefa Munizaga, Art Ph.D. candidate Clarisa Menteguiaga, and me from the arts faculty.

Central to the Art and Sustainability competition was to consider UNESCO objectives. Among them, we contemplated the serious environmental problem associated with face masks. In the quest to reduce the spread of COVID-19, the Ministry of Public Health in Chile recommended wearing at least two masks per day for a regular person, and a greater number of masks per day for medical personnel. This meant that most of the masks ended up in the trash, without a recycling plan in place. With Chile’s population, this amounted to more than 30 million masks discarded daily.

When we visited the hospital, we observed that rolls of paper, covering examination tables, were used for just a few minutes. In the university clinic alone, 600 yards of this paper is being used daily. We decided to recycle both the masks and the paper rolls in our project to transform them into a new material with a different purpose. As a papermaker, I knew that synthetic masks and short-fibered medical paper rolls would not make quality paper, so to be consistent with the sustainability idea, I decided to supplement the masks and the paper rolls with 100-percent cotton-rag pulp from old jeans and towels donated by students.

Another UNESCO objective was to examine production methods and responsible consumption. Papermakers use a lot of water. To be conscientious of water usage, we formed the sheets using a deckle box, reusing the water with every sheet, and re-purposed the water from the Hollander beater and the industrial blender. Finally, we considered UNESCO’s Zero Starvation objective. While we cannot end world hunger with this project, we took symbolic action: the corona paper was an exchange product for non-perishable food that each artist or student donated for equitable distribution among people in need. This task was supervised by social-action volunteers from the medical school.

The project took place in the second semester of 2021. We sent a mass email to the art campus community inviting them to collaborate with the collection of used masks and old towels.The theater department heard about the project and actors and faculty also participated. For safety reasons, we did not collect these materials from the School of Medicine because they had more chance of being in contact with COVID patients. After three months, we collected 8.5 pounds of face masks and many towels and jeans, which we started to process by cutting them into small pieces to prepare them for beating. After some trial and error, we landed on a pulp blend for a strong, flexible, medium-weight paper good for printmaking. We found that the best proportions were: 2 jars of medical paper dispersed in an industrial blender;1 jar of chopped face masks; and 4 jars of cotton rag pulp. To form a sheet, we poured 27 fluid ounces of the concentrated pulp mixture into the deckle box. And, as I always do with my students who are new to papermaking, I added a small amount of formation aid to slow the drainage to have more time to form the sheet evenly without rushing. After two weeks, we sized the paper with gelatin for better printing.

The result was an amazing exhibition of artworks called “Miniprint Corona UC, obra impresa de pandemia” (Corona UC Miniprint, Pandemic’s Printed Art), which showed different techniques like laser printing, etching, silkscreen, litho-polyester, xylography, monoprints, and photocopy transfer among others. We added two posters with information about the process and participants. The opening of the first exhibition coincided with the eighty-fifth anniversary of the University Hospital, so all the authorities wanted to participate on that day. Most of them talked about the importance of the arts in the healing process and their relief that after the pandemic the face masks could be transformed into a piece of art.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this project was being able to present the exhibition at the hospital. Besides it being an alternative place, completely different from the art circuits, the hospital offered the exhibition viewing to a huge number of people. We are talking about 13,500 persons every day, in transit through the hospital, with different purposes, where they can stop for a while, see artworks in the hall, and have a nice moment during their day. We remounted the exhibition at the university clinic located six kilometers from the hospital, in the clinic’s oncology patient unit, where it stayed on view for almost six months, at the request of staff. I am pleased to report that Papel Corona along with the miniprint exhibition was a deeply meaningful project for students, professors, and the community.

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