Languages of Paper and Cardboard

'The drawing is already partly there - it's in the paper; and the paper is talking before you do' Richard Artschwager

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 'Fill (11) 183 x 183cm

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.

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

There is of course a big issue around recycling in relation to this and as students you are no doubt already very aware of how expensive art papers are. Collage has always been a wonderful way to recycle paper and of course it allows you to generate new imagery by a process of image deconstruction and reconstruction. 

Hannah Hoch

Perhaps the most under used aspect of recycling is making your own paper out of papers that have been already used. However there is a certain taboo in relation to this because of the predominance of 'craft' looking recycled papers. The important issue as always is taking the technology onto a further level and making whatever is done conceptually rigorous.
A case in point is David Hockney's 'Paper Pools'.

David Hockney

Hockney's paper pools are made from compressed paper. Basically the paper is dyed when in a pulp state, then the drawing is done by carefully putting the dyed pulp into place and then before the whole thing dries flattening the image down in a press. I have done this in the past by 'painting' with coloured pulp on top of a felt sheet and when done pressing the whole lot flat using a solid flat wooden board, which I first of all stood on and then left with weights on overnight. I used an old felt blanket to ensure the top layer did not stick to the board. You can use cut out plastic stencils as guides for more complex shapes, like the shape of the diving board above. As you can see with Hockney's images, he makes them out of sections, so you too could work large without having to have a huge studio space. The conceptual issue here is of course the relationship between making a series of images about pools of water using a process that begins by floating tiny pieces of paper filament in pools of water. It's also important to remember that when in this state paper can be molded or shaped and of course can be drawn back into.
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.

See also earlier blog posts on paper and this.

*A kite is an illegal written note passed between prisoners.

See also:

Research into paper

Paper: Folding and the songs of trees

Drawing in or with paper

Paper as drawing material

More thoughts on paper