Ohio Dominican University is featuring a new exhibit at its Wehrle Gallery called “Paper Moon: Women in Columbus and the Art of Paper.” The exhibit features eight female paper artists from Columbus.
“There is a real renaissance of interest in paper. … I think it’s a response to the fact that we’ve gone so digital, and I think there are many many people who are still interested in the physical aspect of paper,” said Janette Knowles, ODU professor of fine art and director of the Wehrle Gallery.
“Paper can be sculptural, paper can be narrative, paper can be installation, paper can be abstract, it can be figurative … [Knowles] wanted to look at women coming at paper from very different interests and exhibiting a variety of techniques and hoping that some of them are unexpected uses of paper,” paper artist Rebecca Brandeis Morton said.
Knowles’ work in the exhibit is a specimen case series. “I sew photographs and letters and textiles onto paper and put them into cases, so they’re kind of like these captured memories.”
One of the cases includes handwritten directions that her grandmother, a nurse in the Australian Red Cross in WWI, wrote for the soldiers. She has sewn that onto a color picture of her husband, Knowles’ grandfather. “We’ll never know the whole story, so that’s why I use all these bits and pieces. … I kind of wanted to create a separate meaning, an aesthetic meaning,” Knowles said.
Morton has seven pieces displayed in the exhibit. Some of her pieces are “encaustic,” or as she described it, “imagery embedded in wax.” Two kinds of paper are used: one is very strong, transparent Asian paper colored and embedded in the other, heavier, machine-made paper. All this is encased in layers of beeswax. Figures are then drawn into the wax and inked up, Morton describes.
Her other works in the exhibit are 3-D books. One, “A Picture of Girlish Beauty,” Morton describes as a collection of semi-transparent paper collages that are suspended in arch-like frames. These frames are hinged to one another so they open up accordion-style, letting the viewer see the pages through one another. The piece is full of silhouettes of women and text from an old Cleveland magazine published at the end of the 1800s called “Sheikh.”
Ann Corley Silverman, another paper artist, focuses more on script than on sculpture.
“Where does the written media live in our lives anymore?” Silverman asked. “Where does the hand belong? Where does the body belong in this digital world of ours?”
Silverman has five pieces at the gallery. One of her pieces in the exhibit used to be a bed sheet. She cut it up and beat it to a pulp, then pieced it back together using a wire screen she crocheted using jeweler’s wire. She overlaid the paper pieces while wet so the piece appears quilt-like.
Other pieces focus more of her fascination with handwriting, such as the entire Sanskrit book “Bhagavad Gita” hand-copied onto both sides of a large piece of paper. Another piece displays a collection of old signatures from a museum in Myanmar.
“I tend to be really interested in the engagement of the hand with the material,” Silverman said.
This exhibit also marks the birth of a new paper cooperative. Morton describes a cooperative as “having partners in a business, but it’s also having an artist community to share intellectual, technical and creative development; … a varied knowledge of materials and technique and resources is incredibly helpful,” Morton said.
A free paper making workshop will also be offered March 17 at noon in Wehrle Hall, room 209. It will be directed by ODU art professors and some of the artists displayed in the exhibit. Responses to similar workshops has been positive.
“So many people have said that it’s incredibly relaxing and incredibly peaceful. … They see it as absolute magic,” Knowles said.
The Paper Moon exhibit is on display through April 23. It is at the Wehrle Gallery in Wehrle Hall on Ohio Dominican University’s main campus at 1216 Sunbury Rd. The gallery is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Admission is free. See ohiodominican.edu for more information.
