Bloomsday Papergeddon

Today being Bloomsday, the day all good lit'ry folks hie on down to their local watering hole to get into their 24 hour marathon continuous reading of "Ulysses" this artist decided to honor the day by doing something completely irrelevant, and I think Joyce would have seen the joke, too.

Being a wonderful day, slight wind, bright sun, low humidity, this was a great day for outdoor artwork. So I made a batch of cotton linters paper, usual procedure, from raw cotton linters sheets (which are processed by the paper art people to be easy for those of us who don't have a room size Hollander beater on the premises), to blender which I use to process much water and raw paper into buckets of pulp, to making the sheets, by dipping my mold into the pulp transferred to a dishpan,to slapping them off first onto pieces of interfacing, to enable you to move them, then onto handy glass surfaces such as windows and the top of the patio table.

They'll dry nicely there, and peel off obligingly when ready. They tend not to blow away in the wind, too, a added attraction. Also they will have two sides, a glassy one which was in contact with the glass, and a rough one, exposed to air. And if you like the idea, you can spray water over the pulp while still wet, to make lacy designs. If it rains, same idea, don't panic, it will improve the paper.



Factory setup



This is a post of paper, that means a batch, interleaved with interfacing, and that's the last mold still resting on the top sheet. I'll remove it before going any further. Each piece of paper has its own interfacing, and you stack and then walk about on the heap to force gallons of water out before you pick up the post to remove the individual pieces.



Paper drying on patio door, note the cunning reflection of the rest of the batch on the table.



The shadows of leaves were just Nature getting in on the act, as the paper dries on the table.



Interfacing now out to dry, likewise various molds I used, mostly handmade by me from screening materials and plastic canvas.

I have longterm plans for the paper, but as yet too unformed to talk about in actual words, usual art situation. But I thought you'd enjoy the amazingly formal and factory like precision of my process. Yeah, that'll happen. The blender part took place indoors, safer than mixing electricity and water all over the patio.