Viewing page 48 of 132

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image]]
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Professional papermaker Kathryn Clark is an artist in her own right. Here, Which Comes First—Book or Page, 1982, 34 by 48 inches.

Holes have emerged as major formal and metaphorical motives in such recent handmade-paper prints by Shields as Hazel's Witch Hat (1978), the "Color Radar Smile" series (1979), Treasure Map Light, Treasure Map Dark (both 1980-81) and the series "Castle Window Set" (1981). This last series consists of double sheets hinged together at the top edges. The top sheets were executed by Shields at the Gandhi Ashram paper mill in Ahmadabad, India, where other American artists, including Rauschenberg and Bengalis, have also worked; the back sheets in the series are handmade TGL. In Chicago Tenement, an eight-color etching, aquatint and relief print, one of the seven words from the "Castle Window Set," the rows of small square openings in the top sheet center attention on the double-sheet structure. The print also reveals Shields' continuing fascination with differentiating the two sides of paper by color, texture and pattern, and with focusing interest on the back and the front, the inside and the outside, thereby bringing out the material's physicality. With the holes arranged in grid form around a door like rectangle, the composition can be read, on one level, in the literal terms of its title–Chicago Tenement. Still, what gives this and others of the artist's recent handmade-paper prints an engaging, emotive kick is the sensation the viewer gets of looking into a multidimensional pictorial microcosm teeming with coloristic energy and rocking with textural rhythms.
Like Shields, New York artist Pat Hammerman has developed a distinctive and poetic graphic language in hand-made paper. Her main printing technique, however, is etching, sometimes used in combination with mixed-media
82/ART NEWS
drawing in gouache, pastel, pencil and crayon. Hammerman, who started out as an etcher, found herself growing dissatisfied with "working on plain paper." Although she introduced collage into her etchings, the work "still looked flat," she says. Then, three years ago, she turned to making paper and has since created sheets that are rich in texture, due to her collage like method of embedding bits of thread, fiber, glitter, sequins, feathers and ribbons into the pulp. Working with equipment she built in her basement, Hammerman says, she can produce a single sheet "as wide as 60 inches." The dense surfaces of her sheets are further enlivened by etched compositions of pictographic and hieroglyphic marks arranged in grids and rows. Leaves to Enter (1983), for example, with its linear imagery, gives the sensation of a story unfolding in pictorial, nonliterary terms. It also encourages a keen appreciation of the artist's fluid, descriptive line and sparkling, organic surfaces wherein paper, printing and image are intriguingly at one.
The complementarity of handmade paper and lithography is vividly illustrated by a recent project of Robert Kushner's, done in collaboration with Twinrocker and with Solo Press in New York. The first step, notes Judith Solodkin, master printer at Solo Press and the initiator of the project, "was to see if we could represent an image in paper pulp." This they did by laying down a template of the desired image on a wet paper sheet and squirting different-colored pulps through squeeze bottles. They also devised methods for embedding fabric and sequins into the pulp before pressing. "Working toward making a matrix in paper, editioning the paper and editioning the printing on it" was the ultimate