| BRIEF BIOS of the PULP FRICTION ARTISTS
Norwalk artist Sharon Cowley loves the potential that paper offers. Most of her work involves fibers – either felted wool or a variety of other textiles, but it is the transformability of paper that she finds particularly appealing. “With a little work, support, and time, paper or plant fibers can be transformed into anything - take on new meaning and shape yet - short of burning them - never change. No matter how they are reinvented, paper fibers always retain the essence of paper and can be broken down and played with again.” Cowley is also an art instructor who holds a Masters Degree in Education and has been teaching since 1996. She is the founder and director of TriArt Studios, a non-profit community arts education program. She teaches at various locations in Fairfield County, including children’s art classes at the Carriage Barn and will run a special paper workshop in connection with the exhibition on December 3rd. Jennifer Davies of Branford paints with paper pulp. As in all hand papermaking, the process involves a great deal of preparation. After the linters are dissolved and beaten into a slurry of fiber, a base sheet is pulled and different colored pulps are layered on by the handful, or lines are drawn with a creamy pulp squeezed from a bottle. It is a liquid enterprise and Davies works on a vacuum table that sucks water out, bonding the fibers together without losing the three-dimensional aspect of the piece. Davies is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. Her paper paintings are included in many public and corporate collections in the Northeast and have been exhibited widely, including a solo exhibition in 2002 at the Museum of Papermaking in Atlanta, GA. Her work is primarily abstract and features a rich palette. For imagery she sometimes uses a drawing as a guide but says “I like to remain open to chance in this most flowing and flexible medium.” Elizabeth Duffy takes the most overlooked, underappreciated papers of our daily lives - telephone books, paint chips, wax paper, gum wrappers - and turns this “detritus of our lives of consumption” into objects that evoke a sense of wonder at the unexpected beauty of their transformation. Through her manipulations – cutting, bending, weaving, folding – the materials are seen anew. “There is a compulsive aspect to this, a process of repetition that has a sense of quietude and aloneness and that relates to domestic work, to the crafts that I did as a child. In this activity, there is calmness; immediacy and gesture disappear and instead, changes of mind and accidents slowly bring about an ultimate form.” Duffy, the recipient of several major awards including Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships, teaches at Roger Williams College and lives in Providence, RI but maintains a studio in New York City. Paper as a sculptural medium is Westport artist Jeanine Esposito’s current focus. Esposito comes to art from a career as corporate innovation and strategy specialist. Although she has only been exhibiting formally for a few years, the response to her work has been enthusiastic, as her frequent exhibitions attest. Using a wide range of pulps, textiles and found objects, Esposito creates works ranging from 12 inches to 12 feet as she seeks to represent “emotional and psychological states that accompany critical life transformations.” Esposito makes sheets of paper or sprays the pulp, in either case manipulating the wet material, forming it over armatures of her own design that are later removed allowing the paper to support itself. Esposito does not color or treat the surface but prefers the natural characteristics of the paper – its texture and color. “I try to take advantage of the translucency and play of light as well as the incredible strength and fineness that paper fiber can possess.” To Esposito, paper should not be considered just common and ephemeral. She appreciates its strength and durability, and admires its translucence and tactile quality that, when used as a sculptural medium, provide an “organic sensuousness.” Sculptor Lou Fuchs of Essex, CT pursues two very different approaches to his art: large scale wood sculpture using a chainsaw, and delicate cast paper relief sculpture. Through this latter method, Fuchs’s exceptional realistic rendering of both the human figure and subjects from the animal world are revealed with remarkable detail and sensitivity. The two different approaches Fuchs takes to sculpture allow him to create work that is whimsical and work that is more substantive. A recent MFA graduate of the Lyme Academy College of Fine Art, Fuchs finds bas-relief and high relief sculpture a wonderful combination of drawing and sculpture. As he explains it, “using paper as the foundation of the sculpture, the ‘drawing’ comes to life without the use of a single pencil mark.” See more at sculptureworksstudio.com. Although she has moved to Princeton, New Jersey, artist Eve Ingalls lived in Connecticut for many years and was very involved with a number of arts organizations, including Silvermine, where she is a Guild Member and taught in the school from 1972 to 1997. Her extensive resume includes numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the US, Europe, and Japan, as well as an impressive list of collections that hold her work. Ingalls’s powerful sculpture, which ranges from small-scale to massive, “addresses the issue of loss.” She explains, “My work has become engaged with environmental issues. I turned to handmade paper as a medium to express the vulnerability and fragility of our lives and of nature and culture as we have known them. Paper can express wear and tear and the stresses that the environment places on things.” In many works, paper is presented in its natural color. In other pieces Ingalls adds pigments to the abaca or flax pulp. Her colors are at once strong and subdued and evoke for her “weather systems, times of day and decay” She adds, “In addition to a sense of slow decay and the cataclysmic, there is also beauty, strength, and persistence in these sculpted paper forms.” Anne Queeney McKeown, is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor, in addition to making extraordinary handmade papers – both as her own work and for many other artists. A former resident of Riverside, CT, McKeown now lives in Freehold, NJ and is the papermaker/collaborator at the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She has lectured, taught workshops and been a visiting artist around the country. She worked on print and paper projects and exhibited her own prints, paintings and paper constructions internationally, including recent exhibitions in Sweden, Japan, and Cuba. Her work speaks to the human condition. “I am not interested in pattern or decoration as my reason to make my work; I am concerned with the failings of human systems and human exchange. These issues inform my thinking and they are the soul of my work.” In Sky Pape’s drawings, paper takes an active role rather than serving as a flat, passive support for marks. In fact, she draws with paper. In the work in this exhibition, Pape has torn strips of handmade Japanese Kozo paper and set them in horizontal rows extending outward to create a sculptural volume. She stained some or all of the edges with Sumi ink that soaks in to greater and lesser degrees to create depth, shadow, and texture. The result is a mesmerizing and meditative abstraction. An Eastern influence is evident in the use of traditional Japanese materials, as well as the elegantly composed uncluttered lines, and a reflection on randomness. The Canadian-born artist lives and works in New York City where she is represented by June Kelly Gallery. Her work is exhibited and collected widely. The Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenheim are among the public collections that include Pape’s work. You can see more of her work at www.Skypape.com. Artist Buzz Spector is best known for works that involve books or words. A Chicago native who now heads Cornell University’s art department in Ithaca, NY, Spector created (with Anne McKeown at Rutgers) a series of handmade paper pieces in which words figure prominently, but in a role reversal of sorts – the paper is on the text. Spector created layered paper with embedded string spelling out words and phrases. In some cases, the string carries on past the margin, literally running off the page, spilling to the bottom of the frame. For select words, Spector tears the string out from within the paper layers, erupting through the white surface and revealing an underlying black layer. Spector sees tearing out the string “as being the equivalent of a failed erasure… that calls extra attention to those words.” Marjorie Tomchuk of New Canaan discovered that handmade paper can accept deep textural embossing nearly 25 years ago. She has since developed a unique approach to art that combines papermaking, printmaking and painting. Tomchuk, an internationally recognized artist whose work is in over 200 collections, originally concentrated on etchings, woodcuts and lithographs. By creating her own paper with a richly textured surface and exaggerated deckled edges, Tomchuk was able to build high relief “plates” to emboss her papers by running the plate and the paper through an etching press. To complete the piece she applies color by hand or with an airbrush. Tomchuk grew up in Manitoba, Canada and much of her imagery retains a sense of the topography of wide-open plains under an enormous sky. After earning an undergraduate degree and a Masters Degree in Art from the University of Michigan, Tomchuk traveled far and wide, spending time in California, Mexico, New Orleans on her first journey. She then lived in Japan for two years and traveling extensively throughout Asia. She continues to travel a great deal and scenes from many countries are depicted in her art. “The content of my work has always had a direct tie to the environment,” Tomchuk explains. “A viewer is invited to see more in the art than is found in the title. The qualities of abstract design, texture, color, and balance are all integrated and play an important role in the final outcome.” ORIGAMI The origami familiar today to people around the world today is due in the greatest part to Akira Yoshizawa, a Japanese grand master, who died last March at age 94. Yoshizawa is the most revered of master folders because of the level of artistry he introduced and for teaching a creative approach to origami that doesn’t rely entirely on linear folds. Yoshizawa also championed “wet folding”, a more sculptural approach to creating with paper in three dimensions. This free form origami is now being avidly explored and developed. Four artists in Pulp Friction are pursuing this avenue of expression. Russell Sutherland has only been folding origami for 14 years - a virtual blink of an eye for origami careers. And yet he is one of the country’s top folders, continually evolving his artistic approach to paper. Sutherland has pushed Yoshizawa’s “wet folding” technique to some interesting limits. All of his designs are original and everything is organic – animals, plants, humans. Working with unusual papers, his work has transformed from more realistic to almost abstract stylization, particularly his incredibly expressive “faces.” Visit his website to see much, much more: www.geocities.com/rgs467. The origami component of the exhibition was organized by Sutherland, whose extensive contacts have brought several other “luminaries” to the Carriage Barn for this show. A wildlife biologist who studies Spectacled Bears in the Andes is one of the origami luminaries included in the exhibition. Bernie Peyton of Berkeley, CA has been doing field research and conservation for the bears since 1977, but he has been folding paper since he was 9 years old. He began creating his own origami designs about 6 years ago. Tapping into his years spent observing wildlife in their habitats, he has created a version of the natural world in which each plant and animal is folded from a single sheet of paper. Peyton explains his fascination with sculptural origami: “Most practitioners of origami focus their attention on the edges of the paper… I became enamored with exploring what the middle of the paper could do.” With different folding techniques being developed and the wide assortment of papers available, Peyton looks forward to designers elevating what they learned as a craft into an art form, something he has already done. Peyton, whose sister lives in New Canaan, flew out to visit and to help prepare the origami component of the exhibition. Another origami luminary, Giang Dinh, first learned to fold origami as a child in Viet Nam from books his parents bought him. In 1975 after the war, he explains, “We lost everything. So I only played with some very simple traditional models that I remember.” He came to the United States in 1989, continued his studies in architecture and currently works for an architectural firm in Washington D.C. In the late fall of 1996 he saw an origami book and began folding again. “I bought the exact book that I had before 1975!” he says bemused. He too was influenced by the work of Yoshizawa, and now almost all of his work is created using the “wet fold” method. His original designs, folded from a single sheet of paper, are elegant, ethereal figures, many cloaked as if bundled against the elements. They are at once vulnerable and steadfastly resolute and have a presence that belies their often diminutive stature. While origami presents the problem of trying to create a figure without any cuts, kirigami is created by folding and cutting paper. Toronto artist, illustrator, cartoonist, and caricaturist Lar deSouza is an avowed “paper fanatic.” A late-night epiphany led deSouza to combine caricature with kirigami. He delved into his extensive library of papers, suddenly seeing skin tones & hair texture. His caricatures begin with an idea and a line drawing. He then searches for the right papers, cuts, adds additional color where necessary, and layers the papers, building out as much as an inch to create unique dimensional paper illustrations. His “Martha Stewart,” appropriately created almost entirely from wallpaper samples, is one of three pieces featured in the exhibition. For more information and to see his other artwork, visit www.lartist.com. Brian Chan, a graduate student at MIT in Cambridge, MA, is a rising star of the origami world, having won Best Original Design and two other 1st place prizes at MIT’s origami competition last February. Chan folded hundred of origami animals and arthropods as a kid. A lecture at MIT a year ago on the theory of origami design by Dr. Robert Lang, one of the masters of modern origami, rekindled Chan’s interest in origami and his imagination was sparked. Reflecting his interest in observing and collecting insects, Chan creates extraordinary creatures following the classic origami rule – folding from one piece of square paper, with no cuts and no glue. He is one of the few people in the world who can fully understand the elegance of the complex mathematics underlying his paper creations. Check out his beautiful origami website: http://web.mit.edu/chosetec/www/origami/ Origami design theory, also known as “computational origami,” is an emerging field of mathematic and scientific research involving geometry, number theory, coding theory and linear algebra. Its practical applications include designing folding patterns for airbags or a large flat-screen lenses for a telescope in space. It will possibly shed light on the way proteins are folded in order to develop certain pharmaceuticals. Computational origami has given rise to ever more complex folds, including curved folds. The resulting innovations in technique give greater reign to the folders’ artistry. |
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