CLINTON, NY.- It is the most familiar form of art object, the `work on paper.’ But what about art created not on traditional paper, but out of it? Linen, cotton, abaca, pigments, water, and methyl cellulose: since 1976 a small, non-profit paper studio in New York City has empowered some of the most influential artists of the day to experiment with these and other papermaking materials.

From February 6 through April 10, 2016, the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College presents Pure Pulp: Contemporary Artists Working in Paper at Dieu Donné, an exhibition designed to convey the range and vitality of artmaking over the course of 40 years at Dieu Donné, one of the world’s leading collaborative papermaking studios. Twenty emerging and established artists are represented, among them Jim Hodges, Arlene Schechet, William Kentridge, Richard Tuttle, and Glenn Ligon. Most are not known for their work on paper, but, rather, discovered a parallel practice in papermaking at Dieu Donné.

“Something interesting almost always happens when an artist steps outside his or her comfort zone,” notes Tracy L. Adler, Director of the Wellin Museum. “Certainly, exploration and experimentation is at the core of our mission at the Wellin, which was founded three years ago to serve as a teaching tool and laboratory on the campus of Hamilton. That spirit is shared with the work created by resident artists at Dieu Donné.”

Many of the works on view in Pure Pulp are straight-forward in technique, yet complex in emotion, like Melvin Edwards’s Dakar Days (2006) and In Gorée (2006), for which the artist placed iron chains, work gloves, hooks and other objects on a screen of pulp, using mists of water to blow away the fibers in the negative space. The resulting artworks are ambiguous images of dark silhouettes on rasped orange backgrounds. E.V. Day, a New York-based artist, created Shazam (Black and Phosphorescence) (2009) by pressing pigmented fishnets into thick casting paper pulp, memorably extending the feminist themes she was simultaneously exploring in her elaborate, large-scale Exploding Couture installations.

A number of works on view in Pure Pulp retool the millennia-old process of making pulp by hand to address aspects of pop culture. Glenn Ligon does just this in a featured work, Self Portrait at Eleven Years Old (2004), wherein he employs Ben-Day dots made from pulp, stencils, and a blowout technique to recreate a 70s image of Stevie Wonder.

Some of the works of art in Pure Pulp seamlessly capture the aesthetic of an artist’s other, better known work. A sculptor known for creating monumental works by carving cedar and graphite, Ursula Von Rydingsvard caught something of her sculptures’ timeless, organic and dark ambiance in Untitled (Inventory #6024) (2010). For her work in paper, Von Rydingsvard laid black pigment on linen and embedded scraps of her own textiles in extruded deckled edges. Selections from her Dieu Donné output are the first two-dimensional works this veteran sculptor has ever exhibited.

While in residence at Dieu Donné, Do Ho Suh, an artist who is based in New York, London and Seoul, deviated from his traditional practice of creating large-scale sculptural installations. For Blueprint (2013), a “thread drawing,” he stitched thread into soluble gelatin laid onto a freshly pulled sheet of cotton paper pulp. Using a mist of water to dissolve the gelatin, he then bound the threads to the pulp fibers to create a gestural line shaped by the water current and the placement of his hand during the wet process.

Concurrently with Pure Pulp, the Wellin Museum is mounting an exhibition of work by the Beijing-born artist Yun-Fei Ji. Entitled Yun-Fei Ji: The Intimate Universe, the exhibition will feature sculptural works the artist made at Dieu Donné alongside a large selection of scroll paintings and drawings created over the last ten years. Ji, who is very knowledgeable about the properties of paper in traditional Chinese painting, explored paper’s three-dimensionality for the first time at Dieu Donné in October through a residency supported by the Wellin Museum.

“Dieu Donné’s residency program is an incredible opportunity for artists to collaborate with an expert papermaker to expand their skill set and realize something unprecedented,” said Bridget Donlon, the exhibition curator and former program manager at Dieu Donné. “As we look back all the artists who have expanded awareness of what can be done via papermaking, Dieu Donné is extremely grateful to everyone who has supported the studio—and to the Wellin for partnering on this important survey.”

Organized by the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Pure Pulp will travel to the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and the Dedalus Foundation in New York City.

Artist Roster
Firelei Báez, Ian Cooper, David Kennedy Cutler, E.V. Day, Melvin Edwards, Natalie Frank, Jane Hammond, Jim Hodges, William Kentridge, Jon Kessler, Glenn Ligon, Suzanne McClelland, Arlene Shechet, Kate Shepherd, Molly Smith, Do Ho Suh, Mary Temple, Richard Tuttle, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and B. Wurtz are artists represented in Pure Pulp: Contemporary Artists Working in Paper at Dieu Donné.