Saturday, July 01, 2006

One more semester left!

It has been the loveliest of days. Denny and I went to yard sales, thrift shops and I slept all morning. I rallied despite the post-semester delirium that caused me to look down 40 minutes into the morning and see that I had on two different shoes!

Rather than post everything I did this semester all at once , I'm going to post one or two at a time and talk about those a bit more in depth.

My first and formost goal was to make large scale paper so that I can use it to make "walls" for my installation in December.

I used mostly recycled content for now. I'll revisit that decision again I'm certain as I have started on the larger pieces. Though I rested


today, I'll start on it all again
tomorow in between cleaning up the disaster area that is now my studio. An artist friend is coming over on Monday to learn about paper mache, so I want to get things a bit reorganised.


All of these papers were made by spraying paper pulp through an industrial drywall hopper. After much trial and error, the best air pressure seems to range from 25-30 psi and the pulp mixture is thick but still drippy with water. It goes without saying that the pulp has to be ground up fairly fine. In the beginning and much to my chagrin, I still had to unstop the sprayer regularly. I tend to throw old papers together to save in an undiscriminate manner. There was old cardboard in it that ocassionally clogged it. This meant dumping the pulp back in the 5 gallon buckets I use, and spraying the inside of the sprayer out with the water hose. It's a messy job indeed.

At the suggestion of my professor, using my Dremel, I sharpened the paint stirrer I was using to chop up the pulp. Whoever assumes that art is all fun, assumes alot. This was all an enormous amount of work. Each sheet was sprayed 10-times and allowed to dry in between spraying otherwise, they just fell apart as the pulp tended to run. I am thrilled with the results, just thrilled--and these are just the test sheets!

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