Pulped Under Pressure: Melissa Potter and Remi Gower

I worked with the artists over a couple of days.
I learned more about making paper pulp in that oval machine through working with them.  I learned how to make pulp from flax...which i guess you can eat if you want.  However, I was surprised with the final results of the flax paper and the texture was more like animal skin than paper...which im excited about because there's left over pulp    and it looks GROSS and like SKIN:)

At their artists talk,  they first went through the history of paper making and then talked about other artists who specialize in paper making that were involved with the Pulped Under Pressure show.
Here's my notes:





they explained that they both studied religious symbols and iconography and the work they made at Lawrence was inspired by Islamic geometric symbolism and Celtic knotwork symbols.  They made these stained glass looking tiles to pull the paper with and also do blow out images.


After the presentation I overheard someone say, "I don't get paper making...it's just so against the digital age/machine age!"




Also honestly....the show was about environmental issues but...to make the pulp you beat down sheets of cotton paper and use so much water to make the pulp and clean everything....but I guess less chemicals than big companies use... i actually have no idea... i just know i used 11 gallons of water for every batch of pulp i made... and the flax stuff took 5+ hours to beat down!
Making paper is very labor intensive and time consuming! Like the whole time I was complaining about why anyone would want to do this like we have paper in the cabinet but I seeeeeee why! The results can be very beautiful and maybe the process has to do with the message! Medium as the message!!!!  I just am not patient enough and no muscle:(