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| Papers handmade at the Morgan Conservatory |
In anticipation of my next post, I stopped by the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland last week, wishing to get the lay of the land before I review their current show. Many years ago, I learned letterpress printing at the Annis Press in the Wellesley College Library, which has a well-known rare books department and a book arts program as well. Setting type by hand and printing on hand-made papers was stimulating to the senses and the intellect in a unified way I hadn't experienced before. Such a labor of strategy, technique, and imagination!
My introduction to paper and printing was in the vernacular of fine printing—limited edition books, each copy of which is a work of art in itself, bound with expensive, elegant materials.
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Fine printing: Bible page by Eric Gill, type designer,
typographer and illustrator |
The constant tension is whether these books may even be handled let alone read, for even the most beloved texts are tantamount to art prints in such exalted forms. If Rembrandt made a book of many plates, would you be allowed to sit back and read it? It's status as fine art outweighs its content as material for your mind to wander over. Oily fingers must not touch.
When I became a fine artist myself, I made books by drawing and hand writing on whatever paper came to hand, insisting on the democracy of the book.
The idea of book arts lives in a much more expanded world, though, than the exquisite sphere of fine printing in which I was lucky to learn the the traditions. It is with gratitude and joy that I've followed the career of Melissa Jay Craig , who so radically interprets the idea of the book—form and content—that it's a minor occupation in itself to follow her. She is showing in the exhibition that will be the topic of my next post.
I visited the Morgan Conservatory in Craig's hometown, expecting it to be rather like the Annis Press at Wellesley. My mind was filled with an image of a stately building with Ionic columns. A Morgan Library.
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Ann Starr, 1999, "The Man Who Invented Genius," artist's
book. 12 of 23 pages, ink on note paper, 2 x 3" |
I quickly recognized that it's not that Morgan. The building is functional, industrial, workmanly, backed up across vacant lots to the former May Company's warehouse. Founded in 2009, it is a 15,000-square-foot former machining plant.
The Morgan Conservatory doesn't contain any library of rare books. Rather, it preserves the practices of paper making, letterpress printing, and all the resources that encourage their advancement from antique into every conception of the future. There's no sense here of Don't-Touch, but of experimentation and growth amidst watery slops and the intoxicating scent of printer's ink.
I was invited to wander around and to investigate freely. People were working or pausing to eat a mid-day sandwich, and all happy to answer a question. This is a social sort of studio with few enclosed spaces, where people are happy to work collaboratively and, in fact, often need an extra hand. I'll try to show you what I saw in my meandering around this wonderful place. I hope it entices you to go, and to keep up with their active schedule of shows.
The neighborhood is light industrial mixed with working class homes; the interior of the Conservatory is industrial space subdivided into areas for gallery, administration, paper making, and printing. None is entirely blocked from any other; a sense of collegiality and cooperation prevails.
The exterior of the building has been incorporated as an important part of the paper making facility. It has a large, lovely garden planted mainly with kozo, the paper mulberry tree. They grow kozo to favor the desired stems, which are stripped of bark, its fibers eventually being softened and pulped to become the basis for various forms of Oriental papers.
The Conservatory's kozo garden is being expanded with the launch of an Eastern Papers Studio. The garden isn't just a farm, though, but a wonderful sylvan experience in the city. Pots of hibiscus, marigolds, and short, red dahlias decorate the patio. Their brightness will linger on past the summer when their petals will be used to dye the studio's handmade papers.
A walkway into the garden's meditative space is marked by an ancient-looking archway, surely the sacred survivor of fire in an important building. Or, perhaps it was part of a very old ceramics kiln.
But no, I learned that this is a construction made entirely of paper, relinquished to the Morgan from a sister institution. Here it stands in the kozo garden all year, through everything the lake effect weather can hurl on it, enduring like the brick and stone that it is not. Ah, the book arts! Artists at the Morgan Conservatory see paper not necessarily as sheets.
Inside, there's an exciting sense of possibilities delivered by the openness: It's bright, high, decorated by new work, and very utilitarian. Works of paper art destined for "Contemporary Artists & Eastern Papers" are temporarily draped, hung, or laid out around the area like a casual abundance of precious materials, contrasting with the exposed pipes and beams of the working space. One feels invigorated by the sense that all energy expended here must be productive: There are no closets, no hidden spaces, nothing but loss of concentration to get between an artist and her work.
One is constantly reminded that individuals are part of a working community here. Interdependency is highlighted by safety reminders and notes about maintenance of shared facilities.
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| paper on drying racks |
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| moulds for making paper by the sheet |
The paper making area is a wet world filled with mechanical beaters for pulping fibers, basins in which the fiber is lifted onto the screens of moulds to form sheets, and felts onto which they are laid out once formed. The room is full of drying racks on which individual sheets rest while the air circulates around them. It's a wonderful room of specialized equipment that most people never experience.
At the Morgan, while one can purchase by the sheet handmade papers made to specification not only of size, but of fiber content, much of the paper work taking place is not for printers, calligraphers, or bookbinders, but for sculptors or conceptual artists. They are not necessarily making papers that are sheer, even, and meant to take ink without bleeding. They may be more like industrial workers, making papers stout enough to hold shapes, not to crack, warp, or shrink.
A large and crowded area of the Morgan is devoted to letterpress printing. Letterpresses use "cold type," or type that is set by hand from metal punches, each with one letter of the alphabet, upper or lower case, in a particular font. The artist "sets" the type with metal or wooden spacers that secure the distances between each letter, word, and line of the text. All the text and spaces are made tight in a form that is inked. Paper is pressed against it to gain the impression. Depending on the age of the technology, the press may require manual re-inking with a roller between every impression, or it may be mechanically self-inking.
Typesetting is painstaking. Texts are set from right to left. Once the job is done, the printer must disassemble the many tiny elements and return letters and spaces correctly to their places in type drawers, "minding their p's and q's" (not to mention their b's and d's) so the next printer will not end up in a disheartening, dyslexic alphabet soup.
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| Typecases and printed broadsheets |
The space of a letterpress always smells pungently of ink and the solvent that washes it away. Fans are always on the keep the noxious fumes from collecting. In a period when this work is artisanal rather than industrial, there's no doubt that the odor is a kind of perfume, or an indulgence like absinthe, to be enjoyed in sips, in knowledge of what you're doing.
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Sorted type for distribution
into drawers |
Books are demonstrated in this show not only by Kimura's tiny book, which indulges us in the beauty of materials, but in Melissa Jay Craig's "The Trouble with That Theory: Cliff Notes." Here, well-chosen materials support a cutting, satirical point. Her papers are made from Thai kozo bark lace, flax, kozo and milkweed sheets, and milkweed fiber with joomchi (A Korean method of making textured paper with water). Sagging covers and blanks that serve as positive space, support truncated pages that have...come unrooted? Been shredded? Craig's book may further suggest the disintegration of the book as an object of significance in the culture, perhaps eaten away by students' dependence on the speed of the Internet. This object is a great display of the creative possibilities Eastern papers, allowing the flexibility, strength, and variety of textures to allow the complex messages of this work.
Julie Sirek too, is concerned with the idea of disappearance, which her Korean fibers, joomchi and hanji allow her to achieve. She makes a cloth-like paper that has the delicacy of a fabric worn to the point of a tissue, ready to disintegrate entirely. Sirek uses a full sized dress as symbol for the absent or disappearing woman; the dress is like an abandoned crustacean's shell. We don't have the sense that it has been outgrown, though, but that the inhabitant has been reduced—psychically or by violence. The sorrow is stated in the material, held together only by the lattice around its holes.
Hanji, with which Sirek fashions a dress from spaces, in the hands of Aimee Lee serves as the basis for the Korean craft of jiseung, or paper weaving. Strips of this paper are woven into strands so present and strong that they are fashioned into functional baskets, water gourds, and sandals. Lee's hand is on her baskets from the harvest of the hanji fiber through its cooking and beating, its formation into cords, and its weaving to shape traditional forms. Each vessel is glazed with persimmon dye, giving it a shining, uniform surface that easily tricks the eye into thinking it a textured ceramic.
Jill Powers is a sculptor who uses the strength of kozo bark fiber for casting. She is not a traditionalist. She intuits and responds to her own interpretation of the fiber's the feel. She has developed casting techniques that are all her own. Her concern in not only for the ultimate shape of the artwork, but also for the way that it highlights the kozo bark itself. Her works are porous, allowing light to penetrate them while exposing the nature of the long fibers. Both the material and the finished work are displayed. With a consciousness every artist in this show demonstrates, she is mindful that there would be no art without careful cultivation of the plant itself. Every paper work begins in the earth. Her sculpture of a hand cradling a bee that does not sting; her basket of flames that don't consume—these are powerful metaphors for a relationship of trust in powerful nature and willingness to use it without conquest.
The use of the natural as benign background and foreground both is a technique used to beautiful effect in Velma Bolyard's hanging Rain Garden. This series of panels is a peace garden that beguiles and calms both from a distance and from close up, when its vines, leaves, and flowers come into focus. Her method is contact/eco printing on Awagami Gregory kozo paper. The material must be chosen carefully: The hangings are folded gently into panels that nevertheless fall naturally, and the paper holds the ink of the contact prints in a romantic, present/fading way. The integration of all the elements make it a particularly natural work in all senses.Chicago's Melissa Jay Craig integrates material, subject, and artifact in a series of works in cast paper and bark. These are based on microscopic views of plant roots and stems. These large, circular pieces could be folkloric rugs—gay, irregular, beguiling in their detailed simplicity: flaunting the qualities of the handmade. But her titles are scientific, referring to the biological aspects of nature that inspire the work. In botany she literally explores the intimate convergence of Art and Nature.
Craig's Root/Basis provides an occasion for her to demonstrate yet another technique while sticking to her theme. This gem-like cutaway section of a root is cast of abaca and kozo. It's surface is formed from hundreds of distinct, raised cells. Not only its beauty, but the concept this brought home to me—of life's aggregation of the minute into the visible; of Craig's bringing so vividly to mind the life we neglect without curiosity—make this a masterwork on a variety of levels. It feels bad to review a show after it has closed. I can recommend that you purchase the informative and beautiful catalogue ($10 from the Morgan Conservatory ) and keep up with the work of these artists. Each is a major figure in the community of papermakers—in the community of sculptors and multimedia artists—and a treasure in the world of American art.
