Last summer I spent a month on Eagle Lake as a resident atthe Blue Mountain Center. Some of us went down for a full moon off the dock. Ished my clothing and jumped in first, rolled my patootie into the air. “Thereare two full moons!” I giggled as I surfaced. I should have said three, four,or four thousand, unconscious of the myriad reflections of myself and of themoon in the water and sky surrounding me. Numbering things is one way our humanminds operate out of a drive to understand and quantify. One can break down thecontents of a book or analyze the composition of the paper substrate. Somedevise formulas and theories and templates to predict outcomes and constructbridges, produce editions. Yet beauty in book art or art or such things asdouble moons cannot be counted. Beauty requires other ways of thinking andbeing. Still, we must organize. In 2003 I curated a group exhibition for theCenter for Book Arts entitled “Washi in American Artist’s Books.”1 The showfeatured artists who use Japanese handmade papers in their books. I was seekingwork that threw down the ladder of craft once used to climb to a new plateau,my thinking in alignment with that of the Japanese Folk Craft Movement. Whileliving in Japan in 1989 I visited the craft museum in Osaka. It inspired me topurchase a copy of Soetsu Yanagi’s book The Unknown Craftsman. I began toappreciate art in new ways after reading about the Japanese Folk Craft Movementwhich proposes that art or beauty rises from excellence in and dedication to craft.But this not a self-conscious straining towards excellence. The pottery thatYanagi most highly lauds is that of Korean potters who tossed off pots liketoday’s mass-produced Styrofoam cups. They were working hard and long atmaking. Somehow that work transcended itself. These tea bowls are venerated andacclaimed masterpieces today. For craftspeople the line of approach is clear:hone your skills. The struggle to make coherent and beautiful books as art ismore complex and trepidatious. It demands juggling multiple concerns: use oftext (or not), the many options for getting text onto the page (with legibilityand typographical design included), image, narrative sequencing (or not),color, texture, materials, and book structure. An artist whose work I admiredin the “Washi….” exhibition is Susan Mills. Her books are consummately sublime.This craftsperson/artist’s work transcends craft and materials to become artobjects by virtue of the hand. I visited Mills’ studio to talk about her newwork this spring. To make her large ledgers, Mills uses paper she either buysdirectly from papermakers or in large quantities from retailers. My bodyvibrates in her books’ presence. I want to hold and touch, pet and take homewith me her graceful objects. In the past few years I have met other artistswhose books speak to me. Aimee Lee is a young, aspiring, smart, and hardworkingartist whose artist books incorporate obscure language and texture of handmadepapers (mostly made by her) to seek the universal in the particulars of herlife. Lee, who holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, makes paper usingEastern and Western techniques for her book projects. She twists handmadepapers into shifu paper thread for knitting books and objects. “I am findingmore and more that it’s harder for me not to be able to make my own paper andlearning it’s a really important part of the materials I am using. I miss thata lot, being able to control the substrate from the very start—picking thefibers, the plants, whatever I’ll use—and that’s affected me more than Iexpected. It’s important to me to have the content of the paper be pretty muchinextricable – it has to be related to the content of my books.”2 Lee, anAmerican of Korean ancestry, is currently on a Fulbright grant to work withpapermakers and artists in Korea. Sara Parkel of Filter Press has recentlypublished Sliver of Salt, a limited-edition, bilingual, letterpress-printedbook of poems by Slovenian Ales Debeljek. The book incorporates SekishuJapanese handmade paper, taking advantage of the naturally translucentqualities of the paper. This project merges Eastern and Western papers in abeautifully designed and illustrated fine press publication. Parkel is anotherartist/craftsperson whose work, with its concern for creating a format to holdand feature literature, transcends craft to inspiring art in book form. GenieShenk’s dream journals filled me with envy when exhibited at the Center forBook Arts. Shenk has recorded her dreams for many years in dream logs/artist books.Mulberry paper, delicate and strong, is used to contain her consciousness. Someof the work shows simple images on a ground of color with handwritten notationson each day’s dream. The artist uses stamps and transfers from copies forimagery. The work speaks to all the reasons I love making books, including adesire to combine text and imagery with thoughtfully selected materials andstructures. Over the past nine years, I have been developing techniques ofworking with mulberry papers to produce my artwork. I strive to achieve arichly layered quality in my book projects, mixedmedia drawings, and otherartworks. I like working with mulberry papers because they are thin, flexible,pliant, and strong. When I treat the paper with adhesives, paint, sizing, oracrylic medium, it stays fragile while wet, but becomes stronger than everafter drying. To make translucent sheets, I wax the mulberry paper. I have alsoworked out a method for making stiff paper book covers by laminating multiplethin sheets together, sometimes embedding Tyvek for strength in between thesheets of mulberry. Below, I would like to share some of my nontraditionalmethods of working with mulberry paper. Two-sided Paste Papers I make pastepapers using a mixture of methyl cellulose, acrylic (usually matte medium), andacrylic paint. The paste penetrates the paper. A ghost image emerges on thereverse side. The artist can use both sides of the paper, for example, coveringthe outside of the book with the painted side, then applying the more subtle,cloud-like ghost image as a paste down or end sheet. PVA Adhesive with PastePapers Most bookmakers use wheat or rice paste with Eastern handmade papers.With my acrylic-based paste papers the artist is no longer limited totraditional paste adhesives. I use PVA or a mixture of methyl cellulose andPVA. This discovery was a happy moment for me as I always resisted cookingpaste but love working with the mulberry. Mulberry Carbon Paper For thistechnique, I lay down two sheets of mulberry or, alternatively, a top layer ofmulberry and a bottom layer of any other fine art paper. I paint color onto themulberry using paste paper materials. I wait thirty seconds to allow the pasteto sink through the mulberry. Now I have less than three minutes of workingtime. I hand write or draw a pattern or image onto the top, painted layer. Iuse a soft drawing pencil, a stylus, or the tip of an old plastic knittingneedle. I press hard without ripping the wet top sheet of paper. The drawingaction forces the color onto the second sheet of paper and the image istransferred—just like carbon paper. NOTE: Waiting too long to draw or workingtoo slowly will result in an increasingly mottled effect on the second sheet.Experimentation yields the desired effect. Gesso Scraffito This is a drawingmethod I made up after thinking about how to get the effect of “tar drawings,”a technique—using tar, house paint, and oil paint on roofing paper—that Ilearned from Jeffrey Goll at the Penland School of Crafts. Since tar, housepaint, and oil paint are no good for books, I use gesso and other materials onmulberry paper (or any paper that suits the project at hand). I paint blackgesso on a sheet of paper. It does not have to be black. It can be any color oreven a pattern. I let it dry and then brush a layer of white gesso on top.Using soft pencils or a stylus, I draw and write through the gesso to reclaimthe color underneath. I have a damp sponge handy for cleaning off the tip tomaintain a clean line while I draw. During this process I have about twominutes of working time before the white gesso starts to dry. Afterwards, I letthe paper dry and then paint and collage on top of the line drawing. I havepainted book covers using this method, then laminated and waxed mulberry on topof the image for a cloudy effect. Gesso Carbon Paper This is an ideal way foran artist who lacks drawing skills to get an image onto the page. It functionsmuch the same as the mulberry carbon paper but with different visual effects. Ibrush a layer of gesso onto the back of, say, a magazine photo or a photocopiedimage. To give me more time to draw the image, I slow down the drying time byadding acrylic paint extender or methyl cellulose (one part methyl cellulose toten parts gesso). I lay the image on top of a sheet of mulberry, face up(gessoed side is touching the mulberry). Very gently I rub the image with theflat of my hand. I quickly trace the image using a soft pencil or stylus.Again, the working time is minimal, maybe one or two minutes before the gessodries and adheres the image to the paper. I carefully lift the photo off themulberry and voilà! I have an outline of the image plus mottled gesso (more orless, depending on your speed) transferred onto the mulberry. And sometimes thereverse side of the transferred image is quite interesting as well. I oftenwork on top of the transfer with paint and collage. Two-sided Images I createdtwo-sided images for my project about the violent murder of J.R. Warren. Ablack gay man, Warren was killed by two white teenage boys in rural WestVirginia on July 4, 2000. The killers ran over his body with a Camaro to fake ahit-and-run accident. In August 2005, I moved to West Virginia from New YorkCity to research this murder for six months. The work is an installation of 52two-sided works of art. Each component is four sheets of laminated, waxedmulberry paper embedded with images made of paint, collage, and ink drawings.One side shows expressionistic, collaged, and painted images, the other presentshandwritten texts written in reverse. Both sides are covered in a plain layerof mulberry paper, waxed to gain translucency. Waxing subdues the colors andcauses the images to look hazy and cloudy, like dreams or memories. On thereverse side of each work, I repeated a quotation down the page. The phrasebecomes a mantra or meditation. For example, one reads “Maybe fifty times.Maybe fifty times. Maybe fifty times…” This is the number of times DavidParker, one of the killers, guesses he kicked J.R. in the head with hissteel-toed boots before he got the idea to run over J.R.’s body with the car. Iwrote the sentences out by hand, painted a layer of gesso on top of thewriting, and then laminated on top of it an image that I made on a separatesheet of mulberry. I laminated and waxed another layer of mulberry on top. Onethe reverse side, the waxed paper makes the now backwards handwriting even morevisible. To read the texts, the viewer looks into automobile rear view mirrorsthat I mount on the wall. By situating the viewer in the place of the killers,the viewer is inescapably implicated in the murder. At the same time, theviewers’ readings of the quotations via the mirrors offer a multiplicity ofviews on the violent incident. It was my familiarity with the qualities of themulberry paper that allowed me, through experimentation, to devise this format.For further information about the project, please visitwww.seerelatedstory.com. Currently I am utilizing mulberry for a new project. Irecently read Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I am using aquotation of Wittgenstein for a “hanging book” about the moon. The book foldsup and then expands to hang from the ceiling to the wall in a gentle curve. Theviewer may read all of the pages just by looking, which, for me, resolves thefrustration I typically experience in artist book exhibitions. I cut imperfectcircles of laminated, waxed mulberry and typed the quotation: “See! Howbeautiful! The sun is too bright and too hot…and if there were only the moonthere would be no reading and writing…If I had planned it I should have nevermade the sun at all.” ___________ notes 1. It is problematic to talk aboutwashi in America. The term washi is inherently Japanese. The “wa” of washirepresents peace, harmony, and Japan itself. Other writers have queried intowhat we may name paper that looks and acts like washi. Purists might argue thatGlenn House’s Alabama kozo is not appropriate nomenclature. We could use theterm Eastern handmade papers but somehow it sounds colonialist—I might as wellsay “Oriental”! So I settled on calling Eastern (sometimes seemingly handmade)papers “kozo” or “the mulberry” which is, I admit, patently ridiculous andignorant sounding but so be it. 2. Aimee Lee, interview by the author on March10, 2008 at the Center for Book Arts, New York, and telephone conversation withthe author on April 23, 2008.
Susan Mills, Longstitch Ledger, 2007, 17 x 12 ½ x 11 ½inches, momigami, birch, hand-dyed cotton, linen thread. Courtesy of the artist.
Aimee Lee, Knit Sestina, 2006, 5 ½ x 32 inches open, knittedaccordion book of handmade kozo paper thread. Courtesy of the artist. SaraParkel, Sliver of Salt, 2008, 8 ¼ x 9 inches open, letterpress on mulberrypaper. Courtesy of the artist.
above left: Genie Shenk, Dreamlog, 1998, 10 x 2 inches,collage on paper. Courtesy of the artist. above right: Longstitch binding bythe author with paper book cover (Tyvek and mulberry paper laminate), 2006, 10x 7 x 2 ½ inches. below The Gesso Carbon Paper technique. left: Painting thegesso mixture on the back of a magazine photo, with mulberry paper on theright; center: Ready to trace the gessoed image, pressed on top of the mulberrypaper; right: The traced drawing on the mulberry paper on the left, and theback of the magazine photo on the right.
Installation view (facing page) and detail (above) of SeeRelated Story: The Murder of J.R. Warren (2006), an installation by the author,at SUNY Brockport in 2007, 52 two-sided works (laminated, waxed mulberry paperembedded with images made of paint, collage, ink drawings, and text) andwall-mounted car mirrors. Rory Golden, Wittgenstein Moon Book (dummy), 2008,8-inch diameter x 8 feet extended, mulberry, silk thread, ribbon, typewrittentext.
