Artists are making sculpture using all sorts of methods: casting and hand-molding paper pulp, mounting sheets on stiff armatures of natural and man-made materials, pouring pulp over three-dimensional structures, and incorporating paper with woven materials---just to mention a few techniques described in this article. Six American artists, selected for their diverse and creative approaches as well as their commitment to the art of sculptural paper, are profiled below. PAT ALEXANDER Pat Alexander came to sculptural paper through an unexpected route: a city subway installation in ceramic tile. A painter by training, she worked in ceramics for the first time when she was commissioned to transform the beams of a Baltimore Metro station. That 1981-83 work, colorful tiles in geometric patterns based on ethnic designs, led her to clay wall installations. But she found clay's limitation frustrating: the excessive weight and extreme fragility got in the way of her large-scale ideas. Discovering cast paper, she found she could do everything she was doing in clay without the problems. "Paper allows me to do very large work but to be able to move the pieces myself," she says. Alexander also delighted in paper's contradictions. "Paper is light but looks heavy. It's dried but looks baked." These paradoxes, she found, played into themes which interested her: memories, imagination, and exploration. Door to the Secret is a 113 inch high ornamental doorway made of cast cotton pigmented pulp mixed with clay and richly decorated with indentations and polished stones. The 1989 work looks like terra cotta but clearly is not. The doorway has no actual door, and the opening is sealed by a mottled green, orange, and gold painted board. Thus the tantalizing "secret" is both seemingly accessible, and inaccessible. Garden of Clay is larger and less literal. The 1990 piece consists of two ornamental doorways and a crumbling wall, again resembling terra cotta. The open spaces, including the doorways, are filled by dabs of pulp and plaster, in shades of green, shaped like fanciful leaves. The work's deeply textured surface is achieved by imbedding clay fragments, which she makes herself to resemble plant parts, in the wet pulp, then removing them later. Alexander works often with the metaphor of the door, which she sees as "a passageway, transition, shelter and home, meeting place of two different worlds, the aspiration of something better." She uses the word "exotic" to describe the look of her pieces. Her travels in Europe, North and West Africa, Mexico, and Japan have had a great influence. When traveling, she takes photos of monuments and buildings, but does not use them directly in her work. Her structures, though they have the quality of ancient temples in ruin, are imaginary, she asserts. Alexander makes her own pulp at Pyramid Atlantic, a paper, print, and bookmaking studio near Washington, D.C., and casts her pieces in modules on a four-by-eight foot vacuum table. Since discovering paper more than two years ago, she has continued associations with other media, teaching fine art at the Maryland Institute College of Art and earning commissions in tile and clay. She values paper for its chameleon qualities---the way it can look like other materials---but does not set out to make paper look like clay. "To me what is beautiful and exciting about paper is that it can take on attributes of other things. But I'm not a 'faux' artist. It's the fact that paper is open that excites me." THERESE ZEMLIN Like Alexander, Therese Zemlin was drawn to paper after struggling with a heavy medium, in her case cement. She had been introduced to paper casting in 1979 by Frank Gallo, who makes cast sculpture and runs Editions in Cast Paper in her home town, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. But she soon abandoned the medium, saying "I'm more of a constructivist than a modeler." Five or six years later, while making large cement structures, Zemlin again thought of paper. "Things were getting so heavy and so labor-intensive, that I started to hate the material and switched to paper," she recalls. But Zemlin does not cast the pulp, she pours it over steel mesh (called lath), or hand-forms the pulp into shapes. Giant Peanuts, for example, is hollow. Under the paper covering is a steel armature in the shape of two four-foot peanuts, to which sheets of lath are wired. Zemlin poured thin abaca, pigmented in orange and pink, over the lath, and let it air dry. Eventually, the steel rusted, giving the 1989 Peanuts a deep brownish-red color. Zemlin's work has a free, playful quality that is due in part to her unusual circumstances: she has had unlimited access to free pulp because she has worked full-time at Editions in Cast Paper, beating and coloring pulp. The job, she admits, not only gave her huge amounts of technical knowledge that would take other artists years to accumulate, but it provided her with two or three pounds of waste pulp a day. "When I see other paper sculpture, the pulp comes across as precious. At this point, in my work, it's a very available material." To create Tower of Balls, a ten-foot, open steel tower filled with brilliantly colored balls, she collected pulp all week and then formed snowballs while watching videos on Friday and Saturday nights. Zemlin is attracted to the way paper can change character: when she combines pulp with lath, the paper takes on an industrial quality. And she appreciates paper's spontaneity, especially after the completely unspontaneous labors of building armatures and welding. Her present concern is how to achieve archival quality while following her artistic intentions. "You want to break rules to get the look you want, but you don't want it to fall apart in 10 or 20 years," she says. In her paper and steel pieces, the steel rusts, which gives the look she likes but also leads to their eventual destruction. Steel and paper are enemies, she has discovered, and acrylic spray may ward off rust for a while but does not make them any more compatible. KAREN STAHLECKER For Karen Stahlecker, concerns of archival quality are an intrinsic part of her work. Ten years ago, she took a workshop with Timothy Barrett, a scholar of Japanese papermaking, which introduced her to her fiber of choice, Japanese bast fibers, and to the principle of long-lasting paper. "People don't think of paper as something long-lived, but it is possible to achieve longevity if the artist is careful to follow a few good rules," she suggests. For example: "No shortcuts. I don't pop the fiber into the Hollander [beater] and beat the hell out of it. I set up my equivalent of Japanese streams in my studio, leaving the cooked fiber in water for two days, removing the bits of bark and other impurities by hand." From Barrett's workshop, Stahlecker "took off," she recalls, pursuing dual interests in the history and science of papermaking and the use of kozo, mitsumata, and gampi fibers to make art. She documented traditional methods in Japan, England, Switzerland, France, Spain, and Italy. She now earns her living as a studio artist in Anchorage, Alaska, and also through visiting artist appointments. In the fall of 1991 she will teach fine art at the University of Alaska. Stahlecker, who was trained in printmaking and ceramic sculpture, works on a very large scale; her largest piece, Between Eden and Armageddon, made in 1989, is 68 feet long, 28 feet wide, and 22 feet high. It is an epic in three parts. The first is "chaotic," she says, "maybe evolution or Eden," consisting of spindly trees with large, lacy leaves of paper. The second portion, "Spirit Center," is a circle of tree-like figures with large triangular paper tops, pigmented to look like the earth and sky. The piece refers to ideas about harmony between humans and the earth. The armatures are birch-tree trunks wrapped with paper so that it is difficult to see where tree ends and paper begins. The final part, the Gate, is a wooden grid with sheets of paper pigmented in fiery red and ominous black. It is as alarming as the other two parts are soothing and inspiring. The Exxon Valdez oil spill began as she was making the Gate, and suddenly it seemed as though Armageddon were in her own backyard. She felt compelled, she says, to add images of black rivers to the piece. Living in Alaska since 1986 has contributed to her work in other ways. "There's an intangible quality here that has impacted my work. I'm not sure I can explain it, but it is in the environment and the way people live in relation to it." Her 1986 Eye of Reverence speaks to such issues. It is a tent-like structure, a shelter, of paper (with images, again, of earth and sky) pieces laced to supports of red-painted bamboo. Bold, black paper figures shaped like long feathers line the exterior walls. She calls them trees, but they also suggest something more sinister - missiles, perhaps. Clearly, Stahlecker's artistic concerns---the wonder and reverence for, and defilement of, nature---meld neatly with her technical approach to making paper. "There's an exquisite saying: 'Men don't make paper, nature does.' I'm just one of many factors that coaxes paper out of nature." JON WAHLING Jon Wahling is unusual among paper artists in that he is not a papermaker. Not only does he buy the handmade paper he uses, but he holds little reverence for the deckled edge. All his pieces are distinguished by their hard edges, cut with a sharp knife. Nonetheless, paper has been the former weaver's medium of preference since 1980, when, on a trip to Japan, he visited a paper museum in Tokyo. "It was the biggest eye opener of my life," he admits. Wahling was captivated in particular by the three-dimensional forms created for celebrations, carried on sticks to the temple. "I'd conceived of things in paper in three dimensions, but I didn't take it seriously until I saw all this." Since then, he has been making large-scale paper works, individual sheets cut into shapes and mounted on rods or reeds. He had become aware of papermaking nearly two decades earlier, from Larry Barker, a pioneer in the field, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. At the time, Wahling's field was textiles. He still does sculptural weaving and is director of the textile department of the Columbus Cultural Arts Center, in Ohio, where he teaches and curates exhibitions, but he shows only his paper work. His paper pieces are composed of large shaped sheets grouped to form a larger image, hung from the ceiling by invisible nylon string. Brilliant coloring is achieved by adding pigments in a Lintex base to the finished sheet and also through layers of fine Japanese papers or brocade cloth. The challenge, says the artist, "is to get the continuity between the image and the third dimension." The images are all landscapes, but they are abstracted to the extreme. Trees, clouds, rock formations, and the sea are not so much seen as suggested. In landscape, Wahling finds a kind of visual music - "the playing of large rock forms against timberlands, the sea against the land." "I abstract quite a bit, but [in my work] you see elements of treescape, floral patterns of the Mediterranean, and places that feel like landscape because of open cuts in layers of panels, and negative space. In every piece, there is some sort of element of landscape." Although Wahling is referring to his more recent work, his comments are equally apt in describing his 1988 "Seascape Environs." It consists of eight white, shaped cotton sheets mounted on horizontal rods and dramatically decorated with black diagonal lines at conflicting angles. The paper pieces are arranged like climbing stairs and could be seen as a tremendous tidal wave. His more recent work is more developed: his palette has opened up, the textures are rich, the image is more complex. The overall structure is circular, be it a semi-circle in which the viewer can stand, or a huge, six to ten foot circle. The new works seem to move, even when viewed in a photograph. In European Landscape (1990), the paper shapes suggest tree roots and trunks, but they are in soft purples and rusts, not the usual greens and browns. Flora in Landscape is fanciful: long wiggly strips topped by Matisse cutout-like shapes, all in bright oranges, over which hang squarish blue patches, like windows revealing sky. The "landscapes" reflect his extensive travels to South America, Europe, and the Orient, but are by no means actual recollections. "Real landscape is too complex, so I symbolize it in elements," comments Wahling. WALTER NOTTINGHAM Walter Nottingham turned to handmade paper because he found it gave him the particular look he wanted: old, decrepit, decayed. But to get that look, he does what most artists would not. He abuses it like crazy. "I'll do anything to get what I want. I'm very abusive," admits the artist. He seals his cotton or abaca paper with an acrylic medium, then employs a series of acrylic washes to achieve the glazed look of leather. "The deckled edge is too nice for me, so I rip it, to get the [look of the] aging process." He also purchases sheets of Japanese natsume paper, made from a strong mixture of mulberry and silk, that can withstand his treatments. The end result is heavy, deeply textured, labored, and as far from, say, Stahlecker's lacy leaves, as paper could get. Nottingham's "abuse" of paper is the basic technique behind his work, but he also uses techniques from his fiber background, such as stitchery, twining, braiding, and plaiting of linen threads and other natural materials found in his two treasure troves: Hawaiian beaches, and the Pacific Northwest. Last year Nottingham retired from teaching after nearly 30 years at the University of Wisconsin in River Falls and moved to Hawaii to work full-time in the studio. All of his pieces are called Shrines, varying in size from six by nine inches to eight by fourteen feet. They embody his interest in ritual, ceremony, and symbols, and they have a mystical or religious quality. They resemble something one might see in a natural history museum, but the reference is oblique, and it gives them an air of mystery. One Shrine (No. 4) is a brown rectangle of battered leathery paper, covered by a grid of reeds tied with string, and decorated with black numbers and letters (his own language, he says). Another (No. 1), in reddish browns and beiges, has a knotted piece of paper in the center, and a thick fringe. The texture is so deeply layered that one feels as though one is looking into centuries of work and culture and life experience. All his work is rooted in anthropology and folk craft, not fine art, Nottingham comments. "If people say, 'This looks old. It looks religious or something,' I'm happy." The Shrines look like slow but spontaneous work, but Nottingham does extensive preliminary drawing for all his pieces. "My drawings are the foundation, but usually by the first day, the drawings are in the garbage - and my first masters [degree] is in graphics! As soon as I get handmade paper in my hands and start working dimensionally, I think better." MARGERY FREEMAN APPELBAUM "All my work, says Margery Freeman Appelbaum, "is about how individuals use the objects they acquire and surround themselves with every day, and how the objects become encrusted with mythology." The Potomac, Maryland, artist has spent several years on a series called Tables, Chairs and Sitting Spaces. The viewer would not necessarily recognize a table or chair in these large pieces, some over six feet tall. A flat, square surface may suggest a chair bottom, or a tall rectangle might hint at a chair back, but Appelbaum says she is making environments, not copies of objects found in a furniture store. "They are quiet spaces that invite the viewer to sit and ponder," she suggests. "There's also a certain quality, that they hug the floor." Typically, the pieces have two or more components, one on the floor, another on the wall. She uses gator board or wood as a backing for thick cotton paper (she orders ready-made pulp) whose texture is more like felt than a paper sheet. She rolls the pulp as if it were bread dough, lets it air dry, then cuts it like fabric. The colors are dark and the surfaces metallic from acrylic sprays and occasionally pigments, because she wants the pieces to look "opulent." For further texture, she glues shredded bits of paper onto the flat surface or props wooden sticks or iron rods on the piece. Appelbaum turned to paper when, as a printmaking student at the University of Maryland, she had become expert at using the press, but her work had lost all content. She destroyed her prints, beating them into pulp, and did an about-switch: her thesis show was in paper collage. Many artists like paper for its immediacy, but not Appelbaum. "For me, it's not immediate. There are so many layers and levels between me and the end result. It takes me four months to do a large work." Her only regret about her chosen medium is that sculptural paper cannot survive out of doors. "My work is a natural thing to go outside. I wish I could coat it, but I can't." She muses, "Maybe someday I'll get a $100,000 commission, go to a foundry, have one of my pieces cast in bronze, and put it outdoors." All these artists, with the possible exception of Karen Stahlecker, who seems born to work in paper, came to the medium out of a frustration with a previous medium, or in search of a solution to a problem that other media could not provide. For Pat Alexander, frustrated over the limitations of large-scale clay, paper offered freedom in its lightweightness and strength. Margery Appelbaum's frustration was more personal: she had lost the sense of form in her printmaking, and working in handmade paper allowed her to retrieve it. Jon Wahling found he could execute the three-dimensional work he had been dreaming about---in paper. Once these artists discovered sculptural paper, they were highly resourceful in their exploration and exploitation of a new medium. Stahlecker, for example, figured out how to execute her monumentally-scaled ideas in a way that was transportable, so that her shows could travel. The exploratory process no doubt will continue, for artists have by no means exhausted the medium. It is not inconceivable that Therese Zemlin should find a way to combine steel and paper without the former destroying the latter, or that Appelbaum should one day discover how to make her paperworks survive out of doors. The possibilities of paper as a sculptor's material are just beginning.
