Elizabeth Finch: I'd like to begin by asking you to speak about how you came to work with handmade paper.   Amanda Guest: I went to the New York Studio School from 1987 to 1990, where I pursued a traditional education in life drawing and sculpture. When I left school, one thing that came up was the opportunity for a six-month internship at Dieu Donné. At that time, Dieu Donné was making large batches of production paper as well as working with artists. As an intern I did simple tasks, like setting up the drying system and folding the drying cloths. The first sheets of paper I was interested in making were translucent and tied into the imagery I had been developing in my studio. I would embed a pattern in the paper by using a watermark line.   EF: So you had a studio at this point?   AG: Very soon after I left school I got a studio and started to sculpt things as well as sew on fabric and paper. These were small, fragile pieces. Around 1991 I began making work that was much more personal, much more about my identity. I was fascinated by an image of the Star of David that was hidden in some way. Paper is ideal for hiding imagery. You can put a watermark in, a very faint line that only appears when you hold the sheet up to the light. So one of the things about my initial interest in paper was the transparency and the suggestion of a hidden text or image. Rather than making a mark on paper you can make a mark within it.   EF: Did learning about papermaking coincide with this work in the studio? I ask because I'm sure you were using a lot of drawing paper at the Studio School. But discovering handmade paper seems to have been a part of how you struck out on your own as an artist. You made a big leap between your formal education and what you did after you left school.   AG: Yes, there was a big leap. The school had a very strong position on the importance of working from the figure. Towards the end of my time at school I stopped going to the figure studio and started working on my own. I began to work abstractly, making sculptures in plaster and little pieces of wood that I used as armatures. I also started buying different types of paper. Whenever I tried to draw on paper I would end up cutting the drawing into pieces and sculpting with it. I was like a child playing with these little pieces of colored paper with different textures and weights. I twisted and wrapped things. I would work only as long as I could keep a connection to an internal voice. It was about the connection between an inner awareness and the touch and feel of the paper. The works I was making were really small because the connection wasn't very strong and it didn't last so long. Sometimes I used metal and sometimes wood, but these materials were always combined with paper.   EF: I'm interested in the difference you have acknowledged between your formal education and your experience in the studio and at Dieu Donné. In the drawing studio at school you were guided to focus on the visual. When you made the small sculptures in your studio you cultivated a connection to the tactile. Although the visual aspect was still there, it was less dominant, allowing other ways of making and working to surface. Did the introduction to the papermaking process, which is, after all, a very tactile experience, contribute as well to your awareness of the visual?    AG: Yes, and that is really important. When you are making paper you have set parameters. There was a teacher I really loved in art school—Nick Carone. In our life drawing class, he would always talk about the plane of the paper and the necessity of using the limits of the page. For me, that was really exciting. I could move into this abstract world of the page and the drawing. My figure drawings became very abstract. And I developed this obsession with how to relate to the edge of the page. The same issue arose in papermaking. Through the process of papermaking the edge is naturally emphasized. Somehow I connected papermaking to what had become for me a paradigm of drawing. Papermaking made physical and literal what I was concerned with in abstract drawing.   EF: How did you come to know about Dieu Donné?   AG: I had a personal connection. Sue Gosin \[the founder of Dieu Donné Papermill and Dieu Donné Press\] met my family around the time that I came from England to go to college in the States. Over the years, she suggested that I visit the mill, but at that time I thought handmade paper was this "hairy" thing, and it wasn't my medium at all! When I interned at the mill, I got to know Mina \[Takahashi\], Paul \[Wong\], and Helen \[Hiebert\]. I also had my first solo show coming up and was making works in which I sewed nails between pieces of fabric stretched on a frame. That was always an issue for me—should the fabric be stretched or should it hang? Mina suggested that I could embed the nails in linen paper. We spent some time working on this idea and made four or five pieces as an edition for Dieu Donné. For each piece there was an edition of two.   EF: What was your impression of the papermaking studio? On my first visit to Dieu Donné I recall being struck by the papermaking workspace—its collaborative nature and its existence as a rich physical environment. It was as if it had its own ecology!   AG: Yes, Dieu Donné is an artist workspace that is so much about collaboration. It's a very rare thing. For this first edition the mill led the way because I was new to papermaking. I knew so little about what would happen when the sheet dried. I gained an appreciation of the knowledge, experience, and technical expertise that go into making a sheet of paper. The mill suggested that we work with linen because of its capacity to shrink and pull as it dries, creating a very active surface. We dried the sheets under some pressure but not so much that we lost all of the wrinkles.   EF: So in this case the papermaker's role was to find a way to realize an idea, to bring out something that is in your work but in a new medium.   AG: The paper brought out something that I had not known was in my work—the physicality of the linen drying around the embedded nails was much stronger than the minute details of fabric pulling against the nails it was sewn over. The first Dieu Donné series was a fortuitous combination of things.              We found a way to make very thin, very strong sheets that could hold heavy nails. And it didn't take long to come up with it. We did one test where the nails rusted, and I definitely didn't want rusted nails! We decided to try galvanized nails and the next test worked. Everything came together—the placement of the nails on the page and the way in which the page dried around them. Actually, the linen pulp they use now at the mill is different from what they used then, and it doesn't dry the same way. For another project I created a unique book using antique linen cloth to make the pulp. It came out looking very different from the linen pulp I had used before. It was much richer in light and feeling. It was an incredible color, a gentle white.   EF: The various qualities of linen pulp that you have described suggest that your papermaking has also been about your interaction with and experience of materials. Do you agree?   AG: Yes, that is true. Because, at least initially, it is hard to know how paper will dry. Someone with a lot of experience can begin to predict. You can use techniques to try to get paper to look a certain way—how to go about pressing it and how long to dry it for—but there is only so much control you can exert. Papermaking is very different from sewing, for instance. But for me, there was a connection between the two media: I wanted to draw a line without actually drawing it. I like creating a situation where there is an inherent difficulty in making a line, rather than the immediacy of freehand drawing.   EF: Do you feel that papermaking allows you to approach drawing in a new way?   AG: Yes, but when I began embedding nails in paper I also liked that from far away you wouldn't necessarily know what was in the sheet. It's a bit like a sculpture that also has the linear quality of drawing.   EF: When did you begin to use the grid?    AG: I began working with the grid in 1991. This was when I stretched fabric to sew grids of "chain mail" to it. The return to the traditional stretched canvas was a return to the grid structure. From then on, there was the question of the "imperfect" grid. The grid you draw or sew by hand isn't a perfect grid. Embedding nails in handmade paper makes a really imperfect grid because the paper reacts so strongly. Sometimes the embedded presence created the illusion of a grid that was falling down the sheet. After seeing Douglass Howell's work, I became curious about what would happen if I embedded grids made out of thread and let the sheets air-dry. I experimented with a grid embedded in a sheet that was held down by nails in a few places. The page didn't actually shrivel up; it undulated. The grid was also part of working in a series. Once you are set up in the papermaking studio you can make quite a lot of paper in one day.    EF: When you began working at Dieu Donné you seem to have become aware of a distinction between what you experienced in your personal studio and what you experienced at the mill. Did this have an effect on your work?    AG: A day in the papermaking studio was a fast day. When I was working intensively with Paul at Dieu Donné my personal studio became a place to look at and edit what I'd made at the mill.   EF: Can you speak a bit more about the book projects you did?   AG: In 1994, Sue Gosin invited me to collaborate with Bart Wasserman on a limited edition book of the poems of Czeslaw Milosz. Paul Wong collaborated with us on the papermaking and Soho Letterpress printed the text. All of the art, which was produced in response to the poems, was made at the mill. We worked on the ideas and editioned a page at a time for a year. During this time I immersed myself in learning about book and page formats, papermaking techniques for creating images, and editioning. The second book was a private commission that I designed and produced. For two years beginning in 1995 these projects allowed me to go to Dieu Donné and play, experiment, and become fluent working with Paul. Around this time I began making drawings using cut paper. I placed paper strips in pulp rather than drawing lines with pencil or ink on paper. I also began to think about why I had been embedding nails. I had to confront the ideas and emotions behind this act. And I was doing a lot of writing at the time.   EF: What kind of writing?   AG: I was in a writing workshop for visual artists led by Arlene Raven. We were encouraged to write through a process of free association and then refine material from that. The paper I was making was a response to whatever I was writing about. In the early 1990s, a friend gave me an article on shifu, a Japanese technique for weaving paper into cloth. I imagined shifu made of written messages that could be cut into paper strips and then woven together into a fabric that could then be unwoven and put back together to be legible.   EF: That must have been fascinating to you.   AG: It really hit a nerve! Maybe that was partly why I started cutting up envelopes. The Envelope Drawing series is a lot about my relation to my family in England, especially my father. To carefully cut up an envelope that had contained a letter from England was a perfect combination of feeling very close to someone and also cutting oneself off from that person. Cutting envelopes into piles of paper pieces allowed me to be obsessed with the envelope, the stamp, the writing. Every little shred of the envelope had meaning to me and, at the same time, it was not tearing, it was the conscious act of cutting.   EF: Do you think of it as making something by destroying it?   AG: Yes, what I cut up, I reused as lines.   EF: An envelope encloses a letter or document. I find it interesting that you embedded something that is itself meant to enclose. It's a potent mingling of purposes.   AG: Yes, and by embedding the envelope, which was now just lines, it became less fragile. The first time I worked with the paper fragments I tried to sew the line down onto stretched fabric. When I brought the envelope fragments to Dieu Donné, a lot of things came together. I drew with the cut paper line by holding it above the wet sheet and guiding it as it connected with the surface. You can actually work a wet sheet for a long time and stretch it into a slow experience. After I had finished drawing, we couched another thin sheet of linen paper on top. Once the two sheets were pressed together, the image was sealed between them.  At first each work had two blocks of imagery, like text blocks in an open page of a book. It was a meeting of the structure of the drawing sheet with the structure of the book. In the series Untitled Pages, abstract blocks of lines that suggested text were joined by lines of cut thread. I saw these works in relation to the wall reliefs of Eva Hesse.              After this I decided that the cut paper lines needed a simpler structure, so I switched to a square format that I worked from all angles. It came to be much more about a floating image. It also referred to my father's architectural drawings, which I grew up looking at.   EF: The paper fragments literally become stronger once they are embedded in pulp and, at the same time, their meaning is intensified, isn't it, through the process of abstraction?   AG: Yes, I was interested in creating a balance between preservation and destruction that could be experienced abstractly. A lot of the questions I have pursued as an artist have dealt with what it means to preserve something. The paper pulp is a milky and very beautiful envelope. It is a limiting and containing space. Sometimes I also think that the linen page is like a body. For me, the page symbolizes a lot more than working from life, from the figure.   EF: Papermaking lends itself to working serially. How have you responded to this aspect of the process?   AG: Sometimes I don't like to make a final decision, and working serially I didn't have to do that. I was the bag lady who arrived with all of these cut strips of paper. At the moment I began working, I would start making decisions about what the image—the drawing—was going to be. I had to request what kind of pulp would be prepared and to decide on the size of the mould and deckle.   EF: You were bringing this bag of personal material into what was essentially a public space. The space of the sheet became the arena for an exchange, or transformation, of the private into the public. Is this right?   AG: Yes, but Dieu Donné was a really safe public place. It was a place where I could relay a message that doesn't actually come out in words. We were dealing with the qualities of the paper or with the qualities of the drawing, and we didn't necessarily need to talk about the content. It is a papermaker's assumption that a sheet of paper is three-dimensional—for everyone at the mill this is a given. One is not working on the surface but within the body of the paper. This completely tied in to my own way of seeing paper and choosing to work with it. Paper is a sculptural material—not just a surface or a grid. Paul is very good at picking up on something abstract, some aspect of the work, and suggesting—gently—to go with this or that. He might suggest working with a slightly thicker or thinner sheet. Or he might propose adding a tiny bit of pigment or a watermark. So he would keep it very technical and, by doing that, give me space to work in. I think Dieu Donné does that for all of the artists they work with. It's a very secure environment made up of people and materials. You are not alone, and I think I really liked not being alone.   EF: I sense a parallel in what you are saying about Paul—his ability to work intuitively and with a soft touch—and the whole issue of abstraction. Abstraction can be many, many things, but one of these things is its ability to transport feelings or events, to create a process of emergence. This abstracted content miraculously becomes something you can work with serially, and you can work in a way where you're playing and experimenting. So you were using envelopes but eventually you worked with letters, right?   AG: There were certain limits that I set. I photocopied letters and thought I would cut them up, but I couldn't. So the only handwritten text would be the addresses. At a certain point I began to use manila envelopes, which introduced color. During the Second World War my English grandmother would save brown envelopes and brown boxes and she would use them over and over. My father does this too. He would send me something and it would be in an envelope with an old label, over which another label had been applied. They were funny, quirky envelopes. One papermaking session the envelope "bled" a yellow line. I had no idea that it would happen, and I tried to make it happen again but couldn't.   EF: You were trying to recreate a chance event. The poet Charles Simic once wrote a wonderful essay for The Drawing Center about the importance of cheating on chance. \["The Little Venus of the Eskimos," in The Return of the Cadavre Exquis (1993)\]. His way is different from Cage's, who always stayed very true to the chance procedure. Both ways, of course, are valid.   AG: Handmade paper brought the element of chance or loss of control much closer to my process. There was a charge to not knowing the outcome of the steps and procedures. The pulp itself had a voice. When I sewed on paper, I left very little to chance. I have come to see editing as the challenge to my process now—to take my work as far as I can.   EF: Maybe I'm just reading into this, but I am curious, was it an issue for you that you were introducing commercial, machine-made paper into handmade paper? Was this a little rebellious on your part?   AG: Not really. Handmade paper can of course be very beautiful, but when I used the machine-made paper it had personal meaning. All of the envelopes I've used were sent to me. The rebellion was contained in the act of cutting. It was amusing to write "paper embedded in paper" as the materials. I later cut up my own handmade paper pieces to make other embedded line drawings.   EF: I like that, at least for this particular series, the two types of paper had different uses and meanings and could simply coexist in their different roles. You've also sought to transfer the discoveries you've made in the papermaking studio to the wall and the three-dimensional space. Can you speak about this?   AG: I became curious about how a line moves along a wall and out of the limits of the page or frame; how it exists in architectural space. In 1998 I chose an envelope drawing to enlarge. The first one I chose was 18 x18 inches with a rectangular grid of thread embedded in it, and a thin blue-and-white line of cutup envelope moving through the page. The image was enlarged onto a grid of Japanese silk tissue tacked to the wall. Then I retraced the drawing on the wall by hammering multiple brads through the tissue. Somehow I found myself once again embedding a line in a plane, but this time it was a wall instead of a sheet of paper.   EF: In contrast to the drawings, which you've used to preserve things, the wall works are deliberately ephemeral.   AG: Yes, but I wouldn't say I've resolved that opposition yet. When I began making wall drawings it was a difficult time for me because I was feeling somewhat disengaged from the cut paper drawings. I had to do something else, something that was all about the process and not at all about the product. I was invited to be in a two-person "Conversation" show with Clarina Bezzola at Art Resources Transfer \[in New York\].  Clarina was working on large pieces, and I was conscious that I couldn't, at that point, manage to work at a similar scale. Around this time I had a dance teacher, Nancy Topf, whom I worked with to find images in my body. She died very suddenly, in 1998. The memorial for her at Judson Church was four or five hours filled with creative movement, music, and people. It was an amazing event that made me want to do something in the same spirit, to make a drawing in space. In my studio I had experimented with nailing silk tissue into sheetrock. It puckered nicely and pulled against the nails and there was shininess to it. I decided to create a scaled-up drawing directly on the gallery wall with nails and to work on the drawing while the show was up.    EF: So you thought of it as performative?    AG: Yes, I worked on it when people were there, and it was a great experience. This was a different kind of public space than the Dieu Donné studio. I was being observed, but by an audience rather than by a collaborator.   EF: Did you finish the piece by the end of the show, or did you finish it earlier so that it was up for the remainder of the show?   AG: It never felt entirely finished to me, but I think that was part of the piece. At some point I ripped the silk tissue paper off the wall and left just the wall and the nails and some scraps of paper. I was very excited by this project and started pursuing opportunities to make more wall drawings. After the Art Resources Transfer show, I decided to complete the drawings before the openings. So that introduced a tighter time constraint.   EF: What you were doing was very different from a dance improvisation that takes place in a very condensed period of time. You were dealing with a wall on which you leave marks in an established space over a period of time. It may be ephemeral but not as ephemeral as a dance performance. What was your experience of the time spent working in this way?   AG: I loved knowing that the whole thing was going to be covered over very soon. It was also about being in galleries. It was like being a spider attached to the wall for a month, just inhabiting the space.   EF: Did working on the wall change the way you worked with paper?   AG: Many things in my life were changing at that time. From December 1999 through January 2000, when I was pregnant with my first child, I was working on a wall piece at Dieu Donné. The show was titled "A Given Space." I made paper at the mill and let it dry on the wall with an improvised line running through it in watermark and nails. I had done something similar in San Francisco at Hosfelt Gallery in 1998. Paul and I had made paper that I rolled in blotters and plastic and transported wet out to San Francisco. By leaving the paper wet I could get wrinkles when it dried.   EF: What are you working on now?   AG: I'm working on a smaller scale in my studio using materials I can handle on my own. I'm still working with paper and most of it is Dieu Donné paper. I am drawing and sewing on paper and cutting into paper. I am in a revision process using many of my older paper pieces as the ground for new drawings.   EF: Earlier in our conversation you mentioned Douglass Howell. Could you speak a bit more about why his work has interested you?   AG: I learned about his work through Dieu Donné. In 1997 I got to meet his daughter and visit his studio. Some of the sheets were made of brown raw linen or flax. He had embedded grids in them using strings, and I think he let them air dry rather than pressing them. The paper buckled and flowed. It dried in a spectacular state. He also made paper for printmaking but many, if not all, of his sheets were air-dried. Using a press or a weighted system to dry paper allows for ease in drawing or printing, but it also potentially kills something in the paper; you don't necessarily need to take that step. I cannot begin to sum up Howell's impact on papermaking because he was so important, but, for me, it brought home the difference between printing and papermaking—the impact that the composition of the pulp could have on the final state of the paper. His pieces retained the life of the paper and were filled with respect for the material. His notebooks about the composition of the pulp in the vat filled me with awe.   EF: Would you characterize him as a purist?   AG: He had a reputation for being a purist but he was also doing stuff that nobody else was doing.    EF: He let the process take its own course; he didn't control it.   AG: Yes. I've also been influenced by Winifred Lutz. Around 1993 or ‘94 I was at a lecture she gave at Dieu Donné on working with linen and flax. She was covering the columns in the lobby of the Brooklyn Museum by making wooden structures that were wrapped with paper. She talked about the strength of linen and how linen could actually break wood. She dried wet sheets extremely slowly and carefully so they wouldn't pull too much. She was working with linen like it was a dance or a fight with this very powerful fiber.   EF: Can you relate this idea—the strength of paper—to your use of nails?    AG: Well the nails for me are really a foreign body. The nail wins. It is really inflexible. From a distance, the nails embedded in my wall pieces appear as illusory, sparkly dots. When you get close to the image and see it's made of nails, you realize that nails have punctured the paper and the wall. What I am saying is the nail is a very violent part of the process.   EF: But in the paper works you did before the wall drawings the nail is like a piece of line, a piece of drawing, right?   AG: Yes, but it's a very rigid line. I've placed nails so that they lie flat, almost like little soldiers, like little rectangles. But I've also used them to pierce and puncture the paper.    EF: So the nails counteract the sanctity of the sheet?   AG: I think my work deals with that. When my pieces have been included in shows where the other works are very minimal and elegant, I actually see my work as comparatively crude and violent. I don't see it as controlled and pure.   EF: That's interesting because your openness to process and chance also suggests gentleness. This leads me to a last question. You have mentioned that your current work is partially about editing and revising past work. I'm wondering how this relates to your use of intuition, or what you described early on in this conversation as "play." Is your current process about destroying in order to create, or is it more about preserving something by bringing it back into the present?   AG: I think it's about both. The gentleness is a way of holding something. It can be reassuring, but it can also lead to restraint. I often encase emotion in this way—the nails are held by the fabric or the linen paper, or the nails are embedded in the wall. What I'm interested in doing now is bringing more of my life outside the studio into my work. I'm approaching my practice in a way that is similar to what I was doing around the time I left school, but the works I have been returning to are a rich foundation that I didn't have then. I'm not working serially. I'm intuitively moving between different scales and different materials. In the past, I've worked with repeating units—brads, stitches, linear blocks, hoops—and now I'm trying to look very closely at what those mean to me. I'm breaking them down into individual marks, almost like how, in the envelope drawings, I cut up envelopes into strips of paper in order to draw new forms.     This interview took place on October 14, 2004. Special thanks to Pamela Hubbard for transcribing the audiotape.         Cut copper strip embedded in watermarked linen paper by Amanda Guest.   Hand Papermaking commissioned Amanda Guest to produce a special paper tip-in to accompany this interview. Guest worked with master collaborator Paul Wong in February 2005 to create and edition the tip-in at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York. The base sheet is 10-hour beaten linen pulp, lightly colored with raw umber and ochre aqueous-dispersed pigments. It was formed on a 22 x 30 inch wove mould prepared with a strapping tape watermark. Guest placed 110 cut copper strips on the base sheet using the watermark design as a guide. To embed the copper strips, a thin overlay was formed with the same mould using unpigmented linen pulp and registered to the base sheet so that the watermark patterns match up. The sheets were pressed, cloth-dried for three days, then placed in a stack dryer with minimal restraint. This drying process encouraged cockling and puckering in the linen paper, especially around the watermarked areas and the cut copper strip. The sheets were then hand-cut to the size of the tip-in.