Among the products of our exchanges over the next two years were Take-Off, a solo dance by Joyce that pays homage to Trisha Brown; "Opening," a lyric essay I wrote that explores ideas of voice, body, and musical life; and Scaling the Walls, a dance for three by Joyce. The dance was set within an installation of paper walls sculpted by Pat and was accompanied by percussionist Steve Barnhart and me; we performed music for clarinet and marimba by American composer Frank McCarty. Steve and I also performed an additional duet without dancers. These works were first presented at Cornell University in December 2002. We used the umbrella title Scaling the Walls, alluding both to the idea of surmounting artistic boundaries and to Pat’s hugely significant contribution to the project. For it was her moveable walls of sculpted paper that formed the physical basis of the entire production, serving progressively as backdrop, stage set, and, finally, interactive sculpture. Pat Alexander: I started my career as a geometric abstract painter, but in 1981 I needed to use tile in Geometro, a major public art commission for the Baltimore Subway. Working with this new medium excited me so much that I began to explore clay as a ground for my paintings and installations. Clay's weight and fragility made it frustrating for me to transport and install large work in a short period of time. I knew that the resurgence of handmade paper in the 1970s had led to the imitation of a variety of surfaces in paper, and I realized that I needed to explore this medium myself. In 1987 I consulted with Helen Frederick, director of Pyramid Atlantic, at that time located in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Helen generously shared her breadth of knowledge and creativity with me during a 1988 artist residency, co-funded by Pyramid and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. She guided me in exploring paper as a medium and introduced me to the vacuum table and the Hollander beater. We developed a cotton-abaca pulp tinted with dry red art clay and water-dispersed pigments; it mimicked amazingly the terra-cotta clay I had been using. (It was so successful that I can wow my students by lifting up a “clay” doorway I made with this pulp!) Helen showed me how to make dams with various lengths of 2 x 3s so I could build up very thick wet pulp embedded with pebbles and small rocks over the clay molds I made. Long after I left Pyramid, Helen and her staff would find small rocks and pebbles I never meant to leave behind. Helen also taught me how to vacuum paper on one of Chuck Hilger’s solid tables. I was entranced by the process and by the magical topography of forms that appeared as water was suctioned off the thick sheet of wet pulp to reveal my fired clay forms. When I returned to my own studio, my husband, artist Kevin Labadie, built me a tabletop on wheels using a waterproof fiberboard as a base. We glued long strips of plastic channeling to the four sides to act as a gutter for the water to drain into a bucket at the low end of the table. I used one of Hilger’s portable setups and went to work casting various very large papers. These grew into architectural installations (see Hand Papermaking, Volume 6 Number 1, Summer 1991). By the last of this series, Garden of Clay (1990), organic elements became irresistible and I added green pigments and small leaves to sections of the paper. During a 1994 residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, I set up a delightful studio under palm trees where I made plaster molds from fragments of bone and shells I found on the beach. I cast them with overbeaten abaca onto lengths of tarlatan (a mesh used in printmaking). Abaca’s inherent strength and warpage perfectly suited the ephemeral nature of this project. I wrapped the lengths of cloth around lampposts along the Center’s boardwalk, where they became memorials to the indigenous people who originally lived there. It especially excited me that these “ghosts” were animated as walkers passed by them. They became part of the landscape and even survived a tropical downpour. In 2000 I again used overbeaten abaca to cast pupae-like forms that were filled with light and slowly wafted in a circle. These were exhibited with shaped oil paintings on cotton cast over the same molds I used for the sculptures. While I was happy working this way I began to acknowledge a frustration with the limiting nature of gallery-based presentation. I was increasingly bothered by the brief time gallery visitors were comfortable spending with art displayed in the context of the white cube. At about that time, Ann McCutchan and I began to discuss a possible collaboration, and she introduced me to Joyce Morgenroth. Scaling the Walls—a multi-media performance combining spoken word, live music, a paper installation, and dance—would be the result. Puncturing the boundaries of diverse art forms fascinated me; transforming a static experience into a time-based narrative seemed better yet. Public art did this somewhat. In Geometro, my tile designs were installed on both sides of eight beams, each forty-four feet long, which traversed the area above the platform level for the length of the station. As visitors moved through the station and looked down from the mezzanine level or up from the track level platform, they were confronted with a constantly changing composition. The whole work would flip when they rode down the escalator. The subway riders became part of the piece. To prepare myself to work with dance—an art form that I did not have much experience with beyond childhood ballet lessons and visits to the ballet—I went to contemporary dance concerts, watched videotapes of dancers such as Bill T. Jones and Mark Morris, and read about various artist-dancer collaborations. I enjoyed reading what Martha Graham said about collaborating with Isamu Noguchi. She did not want her sets to be decorative; she wanted them to be “mobile…to be in action.” I definitely wanted that. I wanted the paper to dance. And I wanted to follow an obsession I had with walls, which started with a trip to Jerusalem in the summer of 2000. The ancient walls I saw there haunted me. In Newfoundland later the same summer, I made clay molds from prehistoric boulders to cast into huge paper walls. Back then I did not know where and how these walls would exist. But after the initial weeks of cross-country collaboration with Ann and Joyce (eventually a two-year process that would have been impossible without the internet), I knew what the walls were intended for. Joyce and I consulted for months on variations of the set that the dancers could work with, something that would be interesting sculpturally and also practical to build and transport. We agreed on a format that consisted of eighteen sheets of paper, measuring up to 38” X 76”. I could make this size on my vacuum table and fit them in my station wagon. I needed to build a total of forty-four feet of cast abaca (various heights up to nine feet) attached to frames that the dancers would reconfigure as the dance progressed. The logistical challenges were enormous. I do not own a Hollander. Where would I buy all the pulp? How would I produce such a large amount of paper? In her essay "Circular Breathing," Ann describes an experience she had playing the clarinet: “I reveled in the polished, chameleonic possibilities of my instrument: the opaque, rubbery low register, the luminous, glistening highs.” Though this passage reflected the process of music making, it described exactly what I wanted to do with paper. As the novelist and essayist William Gass said in an interview, “Anyone who is caught up by the medium of any art has this tremendous longing to be able to do what the medium is not meant to do. If you are painting on a flat surface, you want depth, or if you are stuck with line and color, you want to include concepts and ideas. Every art wants to master what it is built for, its essential nature, but it also wants to stretch itself out and try to do what the other mediums do.” I was looking for a paper that was strong enough to be used architecturally but light enough to be somewhat transparent when backlit. With my assistant, Jessica Lehson, I explored various fibers, including flax. After several experiments I settled on four-hour overbeaten abaca. I usually bought my pulp from Pyramid and had also tried some of Dieu Donné’s very thin paper. They were both great but I needed a large amount, so I ended up ordering from Carriage House, whose pulp from their seven-pound beater was the most cost effective as well as the easiest to ship. My two interns from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Kandra Coleman and Christalena Hugemanik, kept very careful notes of the color recipe for each batch of paper. It was confusing because we used various combinations of related colors from different vats on each sheet. They also made sketches of how the various colors (bleached or unbleached abaca with additions of water-soluble pigments and red art clay) were layered on the paper, and whether they were spattered on the surface or couched. Drying such thick overbeaten abaca was a trial because it wanted to warp—a characteristic I love in sculptural work but which is not right for a wall. It needed to be air-dried at first, then weighed down with tile shards (the three-dimensional areas of the paper made it impossible to use a felt to flatten the whole sheet). In addition to fans, I used a dehumidifier to speed up the process. I soon realized that one vacuum table was inadequate for our work schedule, as each piece needed about a week to dry. While Christalena rehydrated pulp and I patty caked it over the molds, Kandra built another table setup on wheels. We then could make one piece of paper per week and roll it to the side of the studio to dry. The next week we would make another piece of paper on the second table. The third week we would remove the first piece of paper and start the whole process over again.  It took me three trips in my station wagon to bring the dried paper to Cornell. Happily for me, the superb tech crew at Cornell built the simple ash frames for the paper. I was fascinated to learn that the paper itself, once stapled to wood, actually stabilized the frames. Ann McCutchan: Pat, Joyce, and I stapled the paper to the frames backstage at Cornell’s Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Joyce and I had seen samples of Pat’s paper walls before this, but the act of mounting the huge sheets began to put us in closer touch with a process every bit as complex as the making of a musical score, a collection of poems, or a dance. Once the walls were complete in five hinged, crenellated, multi-screen segments (some containing pop-outs), the three of us played with their arrangement in the performance space, an intimate dance theatre featuring a wall of mirrors, stage left. For the audience, the mirrors would create the optical illusion of ever unfolding walls. For performers and audience members alike, the mirrors would double the stunning possibilities of play between light and shadow, human form and dynamic sculpture. Joyce took full advantage of these possibilities as she completed her choreography. Each of the six movements of her dance featured a different configuration of Pat’s walls. Repositioning the walls throughout the evening between the four programmed portions (musical performance, solo dance, reading, and six-movement dance) and between each movement of the large dance required lifting and sliding by two stagehands. Joyce supplied some choreographed assistance from her dancers, as well. On opening night all went so smoothly the walls might have been on rollers. But the most intriguing results were the audience’s reactions to what they saw. Not only were people entranced by the beauty and versatility of the walls, they wanted to touch them and interact with them. Following each performance, dozens of audience members—including, always, delighted children—entered the stage area and strolled among the walls, marveling at the rich qualities of the hand-sculpted paper, experimenting with light and shadow effects themselves. Joyce, Pat, and I immediately agreed that all subsequent performances would include an invitation to such exploration. People are inexorably drawn to Pat’s work, and we were—and are—pleased to share it, not just at performance distance, but close at hand.