Since that prankish beginning fifteen years ago, Shetka has moved from making ever-thicker sheets of handmade paper to his recently patented process that churns out blocks and bricks from recycled paper. With these materials, Shetka has taken paper sculpture further than pure art, turning the material into functional furniture and architecture. His attraction to the material rests on principles as much as aesthetics. "It's free. As an artist, I really don't believe in art stores; I don't think there should be such a thing. Part of my work is working with the elements," he says, stressing that art stores impose artificial restraints on the kind of materials one is supposed to make art with. "Somehow it doesn't fit in with my idea of art, [which is] part of my idea of life--the activities I go through during the day and work with are what results in my work." And even though Shetka is a self-taught engineer extraordinaire, which he attributes to being around heavy machinery during his boyhood on a farm, he stresses that his paper press was a natural outgrowth to accommodate the direction of his work more than a conscious decision to set out and invent something new. Shetka's process-oriented approach has informed his artmaking process as well. "Books," for example, have remained a continuing interest as sculptural elements, but, like his original paper, they serve to record process through the actual materials used, rather than thoughts written on paper. He has a series of ever smaller book shapes, carved from recycled bricks, which are each made of one particular kind of daily paper, from the hefty Sunday edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, down to the slim, small volume of the Mankato (Minnesota) Free Press. He is now starting to take the heterogeneous mix of papers he collects in one day and, through pressing them into one block, make a book as a material record of that day. Eventually he plans to make books that will open, where the inside contents will relate to what he was doing on that particular day, an alternative sort of diary. Other books he has made combine holographic images (an interest which dates back to 1972) inset into the book of recycled paper. The combination of two such diverse elements--the natural elemental feel of the paper and the high-tech, semi-intangible opalescences of the holograms--make an object that is both visually and theoretically rich. "Sculpturally [the combination] is fascinating," says Shetka. "In terms of a book, if you put a hologram on a book, you can 'look through' the book, instead of paging through it." One such book, with an inset relief of the Botticelli Venus on one side and a holographic recreation of a Chinese sculpture on the other side, adds Shetka's ever-present architectural concerns, as the surface of the book itself appears to be made of proportionally huge stone blocks, evoking an edifice, as if there were rooms to explore within the book. Indeed, Shetka has done more than just experiment with architectural ideas on a small scale. In his office at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, is a sampling of smaller bricks stamped with various relief moldings. Shetka never ceases to extoll the material's virtues. He has developed a method to recycle virtually any form of paper, be it newsprint, glossy magazines, or cereal boxes. The paper can be layered in different colors, producing a kind of geological strata. It can be mixed with plaster or concrete and, because of the paper's innate flexibility, it will not shatter the way concrete can. Shetka can carve it, saw it, rout it, or drill it. He can make it as soft as brushed suede or, coated with polyurethane, as smooth as polished marble. Shetka also uses dyes and paints, but even more exciting to the artist is the possibility of layering pigment into the material itself, to the extent that surface color and material become inseparable. Another of the material's advantages is its ability to receive relief molding. Once a metal plate is made, he says, he can "stamp these out like cookies." Among the molding samples, one finds both straightforward architectural motifs that might adorn any cornice and others that are more personal images. One such image is that of a twister, which Shetka used in his "Tornado House" installation. Shetka built a structure of redwood and paper, and made both "day" and "night" tornado rooms. For the "day" tornado, Shetka built a living room, with a small television set playing in it. Heat sensors in the room respond to the presence of those viewing the piece and send signals which activate a tornado. The television airs a tornado warning, a familiar broadcast during Minnesota summers. The "night" tornado is set in a bedroom, where the tornado forms right in front of the bed, glowing with phosphorescence. The moldings also figured in a 12-by-16 foot house Shetka built for a temporary exhibit last year at the Children's Museum in St. Paul. Not only was the house built entirely from his recycled paper blocks, but so were the child-scale furniture and toys inside it. That installation was solid proof of the material's durability, as children visiting the exhibit climbed all over it without damaging it. From this initial experience, Shetka plans to continue to expand his paper architecture into a whole series of structures built of paper. Not only will he use moldings, but pillars and pilasters as well. In one of his college studios, Shetka shows a column base whose rounded edges form the artist's profile, much like the old "vase" optical illusion. Shetka explains almost gleefully the eerie effect that will result from light cast upon the column base: a shadow of the profile will appear, without the actual presence of a figure. Shetka plans large relief sculptures--approximately 10 x 20 feet --using different papers and, eventually, different pigmentation. The window frames will be pressed into the actual fabric of the walls. Within the structure, Shetka plans furniture as well as life-size figures, using the recycled pulp sculpted and molded onto armatures. Both the figures and the sculptures will feature pigmented paper, as well as holograms. This project, however, will have to wait until he completes the purchase of a 160-acre farm near his hometown of New Prague, Minnesota, which he hopes will become a "paper farm," a production facility where silos will be used to store paper, barns to dry the paper, and sheds to press paper. The farm will be the site of his structures as well as an adjunct to his all-encompassing "World Art Project," a long-term multi-media installation to be constructed on four acres of land in Webster, Minnesota. As the name implies, the project is global in scope, and has garnered quite a bit of national and international publicity. What Shetka is doing is soliciting contributions worldwide of a one-dollar bill and one belonging with personal resonance to its contributor to include in the project. Thus far, among other items, he has collected 4-H prize ribbons, wisdom teeth, shoes, and audio recordings. The project will continue to develop his architectural use of paper as well. "I see no difference between sculpture and architecture, except architecture you can walk into," says Shetka. "I look at my work as architectural sculpture, using... [the same kinds of elements that have] evolved in architecture; in architecture you have glass, I've got holograms. In the tornado piece, you've got wiring. This is where my world art project is going. I'm creating a whole environment using all the materials I've received and somehow the paper will be incorporated into it." Shetka calls it a "lifetime installation," once again, a natural outgrowth of his artmaking process. "I can't continue putting this stuff in galleries. It takes too much time. But more than that, in the galleries you get something that's 'finished.' What is called 'finished' when [my] show opens is really just the beginning, when I really start manipulating the space I'm working in."
