If the paper is talking before you do, what is it saying? As
with most questions the answer is context specific. For instance, what paper means in prison
is very different to what paper means in an office or in an art studio. However
as an artist you have to become aware of all these possible reads, because you
will need at some point to control how audiences begin their engagement with your
practice.
In jail, the
everyday things we take for granted have their values changed. Paper, in the form of books,
magazines, letters, toilet paper or simply rubbish becomes valued not only for
what it is, but for what it can become.
A kite* adhered to the bottom of a table by labels from a stick of deodorant.
Read this article on paper in prison to get an idea of how important
paper is to prison inmates and then reflect on how your own experience has
changed how you value paper and how you might possibly be able to communicate
alternative values surrounding paper in the work you do.
Look around you now and see how many uses
of paper you can identify in your immediate surroundings. An initial list of
things made from paper is fascinating and can take us out into a wide range of
occupations and interests.
Government of Paper: The
Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan by Matthew Hull is a book, again
more paper, that explores how paper is essential to the construction of a city.
In the planned city of Islamabad, order and disorder
are produced through the ceaseless inscription and circulation of millions of
paper artifacts among bureaucrats, politicians, property owners, villagers,
imams (prayer leaders), businessmen, and builders. The implications of such a
thorough paper mediation of relationships among people, things, places, and
purposes is that the ‘people of the book’ are not only shaped by religion but
by a bureaucracy that is itself shaped by other people of the book, the
Christian colonists of the past basing
their own bureaucracy on the Biblical need to list and document. Government
of Paper explores these issues in the routine yet unpredictable realm of
the Pakistani urban bureaucracy, showing how the material forms of postcolonial
bureaucratic documentation produce a distinctive political economy of paper
that shapes how the city is constructed, regulated, and inhabited. Files, maps,
petitions, and visiting cards constitute the enduring material infrastructure
of more ephemeral classifications, laws, and institutional organizations.
Sacks, seed packets, animal bedding,
wallpaper, damp-proof courses, roofing materials, flooring, flame resistant
papers, plasterboard, decorative laminates for
furniture, bill receipts, circulars, catalogues, filing systems, sales
and service manuals, brochures, office stationary, fascia boards, door and roof
liners, books, driving licences, writing pads, envelopes,
newspapers, tissues, paper plates, paper cups, toilet paper, kitchen towels,
table napkins, lampshades, clothes, wall charts, flip charts, report cards,
insulating boards, electrolytic condenser paper, wrapping and identification for
electrical cables, printed circuits, and battery separators, menu cards, paper
hats, crackers, fireworks, wrapping paper, paper bags, cardboard boxes, programmes, playing
cards, board games, kites, model aircraft, filters for water, air, coffee, tea
bags, medicine, beer, oil, impregnated
papers for polishing, waxing, and cleaning etc.etc.etc........... Look around your environment
and add to this list.
All of the items above can be used as paper surfaces to draw on and each one brings to the table a different possibility in terms of both materials play and conceptual issue. Office stationary in particular is a rich field to explore; any of you who have worked in offices will probably have been bored at some point and have begun to doodle on whatever is at hand.
Alan Brookes (an ex student from LCA) has this to say about 'Fill (II)'. 'It started as a found scribble on a discarded post-it note. I was attracted to its bored, absent-minded spontaneity, its author filling in time as well as the physical space of the piece of paper. I enjoyed its structure and its disciplined use of the square. By remaking the image, enlarging and magnifying its surface detail, my intention was to harness the attitude of the original and add to it a perverse, fragile peculiarity. The process and the image act as a container for managing an insane desire to make gestural marks'. The post-it has of course many other possible responses.
All of the items above can be used as paper surfaces to draw on and each one brings to the table a different possibility in terms of both materials play and conceptual issue. Office stationary in particular is a rich field to explore; any of you who have worked in offices will probably have been bored at some point and have begun to doodle on whatever is at hand.
Alan Brookes 'Fill (11) 183 x 183cm
Marc Johns
Marc Johns draws on his post it notes, the paper is ideal for one liners and suggests an informal, throw away series of ideas. However he uses a conventional notebook to work his ideas out first. He is one of those artists that work in between illustration and fine art, but as all the images are his ideas, I would suggest he ought to be seen as a fine artist who uses popular graphic conventions. 
Mary Suzuki is an illustrator who draws on coffee cups, and the Leeds based fine artist Phil Hopkins often reuses old cardboard as a support for his work. But they are very different in effect; Suzuki reflects the world of leisure associated with going for a coffee on the surfaces of her cups, whilst Hopkins' use of discarded cardboard suggests a much more problematic relationship with paper based materials, one that suggests that in a society of the 'throw away' both materials and people are wasted.
Phil Hopkins
Hannah Hoch
A case in point is David Hockney's 'Paper Pools'.
David Hockney
However if you try and search online for techniques in relation to these processes you will find it hard to not be inundated by hundreds of low quality craft sites, all trying to show you how to work with paper molding techniques. This is why I suspect most people steer away from this sort of work. But when an artist begins to refine the techniques some beautifully controlled surfaces can be made. Gill Wilson is someone worth looking at just to see how carefully she controls the process of working with paper.
Gill Wilson.
Once again this post just dips a toe into the waters of paper and possible meanings. The main point being that there is so much more to paper than simply buying the standard readymade artist's papers.
*A kite is an illegal written note passed between prisoners.
See also:
pictures show a great use of cardboard
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