Playing up nothing: Making holes out of papers
We cast with blue jean cotton rag paper filling the spaces between the islands of plywood. The garden store pebbles added ripples of texture.
Holes in your soul help you breathe out 2018 handmade cast rage cotton and pigmented abaca papers, 30” x 38” x 11”
enclosing negative spaces - Holed’ers
We like negative space, so we cast some. We laid down some odd shaped plywood pieces and filled in the space around them with wet sheets of lightly pressed cotton paper. The pebbles were pressed in for texture.
We like the thick flange-like, shadow-catching edges that run around the shapes. The resulting form invites entanglement.
We call them “holed’ers” because the pieces were initially, at least, holed by positive shapes.
The second holed’er has more color.
We started laying down paper shapes to build up the form and let that process suggest where the holes would go. Unfortunately, the plywood shapes worked much better than these bland angular gaps. After covering up this side in black, we used some pastel to sketch out some hole modifications. Though we promptly covered up the pastel, we liked it and we use it again in our third holed’er try.
We laid out a patchwork of paper shapes and negative spaces before manipulating them, adding and subtracting as necessary.
The final piece has a nice exchange between the easy, verdant shapes on this side and the smoky blue and black of the reverse.
We increased the sizes of the holes by simply cutting and folding the paper back on itself rather than cutting it away. The benefit is that it gave us some color on the black side We also added some paper marbled with blue and black pulp. We dried the piece over large plywood shapes to complement the negative space contours as well as to give the piece some dimension and throw a little shadow.
That light veronese green pastel on the wet black rag paper was a simple guide as to where to tear and fold back. We’ve been using pastel on wet paper ever since because it is so dreamy, creamy and damn near unseemly.
We planned to trim away the folded back bits, but we decided they should stay put. The plywood mold with its similar contours and simple stepped relief was enough to give the piece some depth and gesture.
The next holed’er began with drawings generated by swopping a pencil or pastel back and forth.
We chose the colors and worked with them for a while before one of us said, “Those are Dunkin’ Donuts colors, aren’t they?” They are, but we were hooked on them by then.
studio shot of sketches for new holed’ers.
1st layer of new holed’er is constructed from pigmented cotton linters/abaca mix. We wanted to exaggerate the negative spaces so they’d compete with the colors for focus.
To chill the DD vibe a little, we again made one side a single color. This time white. We added some pastel to juice it a bit.
We tried water color, but painting on wet lightly pressed paper requires lightning brushwork. We found it easier to paint on scraps of wet paper and monoprint them onto the piece.
Pastel and monoprinting was used on the flip side to jazz up the bleak whiteness.
Taking advantage of the large netlike construction, we could flip parts front to back to push some dimensionality even before we used it in compositions.
The finished holed’er offers a lot of connections points for interlocking with other elements in composing our sculptures.
We were happy with the piece at this point. It looked OK as flatwork, but we were hoping it would be more dimensional and floppy. It also had to drape well with others. We chased away the flatness by folding over and twisting parts and then fitting them back together in a new way.
We love the piece but orange and pink always make it jump out of a composition. Recently, we spliced in the green straps to cool the other colors’ jets. We also cut and rearranged its parts to make it long and narrow.
LandesSullivan at gmail.com