Blowouts of clamps, fresh and wet, dry and used.
We deckle box a sheet of mixed black and white cotton pulp. After removing the deckle, we lay some weighty, interesting shapes on the sheet (in this case some steel clamps.) Then we remove all the pulp still showing by blowing it out with the spray from a water hose. The weight of the objects keeps the water pressure from displacing them and disturbing the pulp beneath.
Pulled a sheet of cotton paper and laid clamps on the sheet while still on the mould to protect the fiber in those places for the blow-out
We used our fingers and a water spray to blow away the paper around the clamps. When we lifted off the clamps, we had our clamp shaped silhouettes of fiber.
blowout couched on backing sheet
After the clamps are removed, what is left is then couched onto an orange base sheet. Both the black and white sheet and the orange are from cotton rag and linters and were formed with a 12" x 18" deckle box. We did several of these sheets, one of which was torn into strips and collaged into one of the works shown below. Most of another sheet was wrapped around the abaca coils that bend a scrap of luan as seen in the other work.
We learned this technique at an open studio session at Dieu Donné paper mill.
A couple more examples -
after blowing the visible pulp away from a thrift store placemat
peeling back the place mat mask
ready to be couched on to a base sheet
a light uneven touch brings off an artistic amount of pulp onto the base sheet.
The first blowout and a 2nd one a few minutes later
sketched a tangle on a sheet of rubber, cut it out. the scattered pulp like that at left is often quite dramatic and often becomes part of what get couched onto the backing sheet
getting masks off the wet sheet can be tricky that can require a lot of pressing, peeling and lifting
ready for couching on to a base sheet
We used a scrap of one of the blowout sheets at the top to encircle the network of coils on this bent wood piece. This work is from table top works
There’s something tiger stripe-like about this blowout. We think that gave us the idea to cut one of the sheets in strips of stripes. This tapestry was in a juried show organized by a friend in Green Lake WI. She walked by it for a month in the gallery and decided she needed to keep walking by it every day. more like this in paper objects
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