Making Paper, Exploring Composition, Integrating image, text (words), and found materials + Deforestation ... Blog Reminder!

40 sheets of handmade paper by students in Art 156 Art-En

Last week began with an exploration of papermaking and consideration of how artists can use the power of art to explore environmental themes. We watched the film Chasing Ice and talked about how photographer James Balog's Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) resulted in amazingly gorgeous photographs that reveal the speed at which the ice caps are actually melting.

Following discussion of Balog's work, and the oals/parameters of our project,each student was asked to make 3 - 5 sheets of handmade paper using waste paper from the office of Campus Involvement. We discussed the papermaking process, general ideas about color (since our waste paper is colored paper), composition and space. Students were asked to explore the papermaking process and to integrate one image that relates to deforestation, one fact about deforestation (text) and one found material/object into each sheet of paper they made.

While not every student followed the directions explicitly (some forgot to use text or images or the found materials), the collective results are visually wonderful and troublingly provocative.

Once the paper was pinned up we began a more indepth conversation about composition and collage (including info on collage history and the impact on contemporary art)

Reminder to students: for your blog entry this week (due Sunday 9/15 by 9pm) - choose one sheet of paper made by one of your classmates and one sheet of paper that you made. Photograph both sheets and put them on the blog and do a compare/contrast critique of the two works. Please model this after the compare/contrast critique response found in Chapter 6: Critical Thinking, by Mary Stewart, which was our reading for Monday's class. Be sure to post images of your 3 - 5 sheets of paper too!