slowly she turned

My personal experience in this class, and the overall experience at JCCFS, felt transformative. My emotions were all over the place, and I was overwhelmed on Monday and Tuesday morning. There was so much to discover in such a short time – such a wide array of possibilities to follow – how would I choose a path? I needed some kind of focus to keep from spinning off into the universe, and as a neurodivergent person who can have a panic attack when a plethora of goodness is presented to me, this was a concern. I had given up papermaking because of my back pain issues – would I be able to last the week?

I talked to Nicole late on Tuesday morning, then skipped lunch to take some alone time in my room. There, I figured it out. It was like a switch flipped on. The same lesson I have to relearn over and over. I’m not here to produce. I’m here to learn and have fun while doing it. Fortunately, that is a key part of the Folk School mission. I stopped worrying about a direction or getting to try everything that I wanted to learn, and suddenly, I was free. I played.

We used a pour and drain method of papermaking because we weren’t after perfect sheets. We were going to tear them up while damp to wrap our armatures. The paper pulp available was overbeaten and so had a high shrinkage factor. This meant that it was tough and tight on the armatures when it dried. We used bleached abaca, flax, and later in the week we beat our own cooked kozo (mulberry bark strips) and used it in paper and in strip form.

I had come there with the intention of learning to make the wire/paper bird sculptures that Bryant was creating, and I did make three little birdies. But there were so many abstract ideas emanating from the materials themselves, especially from found sticks. Bryant started us out with making random weave wire orbs.

I wrapped sticks with some lace I brought and different papers and kozo strips, then I dyed some of them.

My first birdie was dipped in bleached abaca pulp, then later I wrapped some paper on it. I dyed it in indigo, then glued (with methylcellulose) a light piece of paper to its underside. I might color it later to make it look more bluebirdish. Also need to add eyes.

Towards the end of the class, I made a bird with just the flax pulp, and the wire rusted beautifully. Then I had one odd little wire orb that I had used to experiment with wrapping cloth and paper on, and I found this rusty hook that I brought home from a Cornish beach, so it became a duck/dragonfly kind of hybrid.

I intended for this wire to become a big birdie but it had other ideas. The spiral bit came out of the trash can. This paper was almost dry when I covered the shapes but it still had some shrinkage in it.

For this one, I was playing with strips of kozo and a sheet of paper I had made with kozo strips embedded in it, but it was not behaving so I tore it in two and attached it to this trio of sticks. The “back” has the lacy kozo bark that you tease apart but as much as I like the look, I found that the process made my blood pressure rise when I had trouble controlling it.

Maybe one of my very favorites – the lesson of stopping at the right point. The stick did break off at the top later, but it still looks good, like a leaf.

This tray was filled with rocks I picked up there and a cone of some kind that I dipped in paper pulp. The tray is kozo of different forms. I dyed it with black walnut.

Finally, Miz Shirley Squirrely. I began Shirley in Bryant’s “Wrapping Wild” class last summer, and brought her with me to finish her in this class. I wrapped the dyed lace around her neck and front, attached a pulp-dipped pine cone for her tail, made ears out of lace and used bits of ink painted pine cone pieces for her eyes and nose. The silk leaf is her “party dress.” Her paws are leather from an upcycled belt.

I didn’t come away with many sheets, but here’s a shot of a kozo sheet I made and dipped in indigo and poured black walnut dye over it to get that almost black color.

Since most of the art work I do takes a lot of planning and is very slow, it was very refreshing to have lots of little projects going at once. While some things were drying, I’d be making paper or dyeing or making another wire structure. IT WAS SO MUCH FUN!