Melinda West | West Gardens Basketry

Growing, gathering, and weaving with plant fibers from the Pacific Northwest

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Paper From Plants – A Lesson in Resilience

September 26, 2021 By Melinda

The word resilience comes to mind while making papers from plants. Heronswood Gardens is located on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State. It is owned and operated by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe and Heronswood is a wonderful place to contemplate the meaning of resilience.

Kara Horton making paper

In 2019 Kara Horton and I received a grant from the Port Gamble S’Klallam Community Awards Program to teach weavers and artists from the Port Gamble S’Klallam community how to utilize their weaving scraps to make paper. Our ultimate goal was to work together to bring an awareness of yet another gift of plants – the cellulose fibers contained in certain plants’ stems, leaves, or inner bark.

Examples - Plants to Paper
Examples – Plants to Paper

As has happened for so many others who planned programs and workshops, we missed our opportunity to teach in 2020 because of Covid-19 lockdowns. Fortunately where I live, many people have recieved their vaccinations thanks to the generosity of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Nation, who are known as “The Strong People”, and the Suquamish Nation, who are known as “The People of the Clear Salt Water”. These Sovereign Nations made vaccines available to those outside of their own communities at a time of great need.

Plants to Paper at Heronswood Gardens

Because most everyone in this community has been vaccinated and rapid testing is available at the new Port Gamble S’Klallam Health Clinic, Kara and I got the go-ahead to teach the workshop this September 2021.

Paper From Plants at Heronswood
Paper From Plants at Heronswood

So on the first rainy morning we’ve had in a long time, Kara and I packed each of our vehicles full – with blenders, crockpots, plant pulps, molds, examples, buckets, hoses, drying cloths, and lots of food. And outside the Garden Shed in a covered area at Heronswood Gardens, we met the most wonderful group of artists and educators – who were ready to learn!

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”  Mahatma Gandhi

Ed Carriere, Suquamish Elder
Ed Carriere, Suquamish Elder shows the cedar paper lined basket he made.

Kara and I were among elders, master basket makers, Coast Salish wool weavers, Raven’s Tail weavers, bead-jewelry makers, and cultural educators. We were humbled by the wealth of talent and experience represented.

Chris Maynard’s work with Wasp Paper in his show at BIMA “Featherfolio”

Wasps and other creatures have always made paper, but to be clear, the Port Gamble S’Klallam People did NOT have a tradition of paper making. Like every other Oral culture, that every person living today has descended from, Oral cultures did not need paper.

But human people have always needed to make “marks” to leave information, so many interesting ways have been devised to do this over thousands of years of human existence. From painted hand-prints and pictographs on cave walls, to runes and petroglyphs carved in stone, Oral cultures devised ways to pass on vital information about how to live in a place over time. Information is passed along through relationships of family and community, through teaching and mentoring, and through the practice of cultural art forms.

Ed Carriere’s Skokomish Style Basket lined with Cedar Paper
Ed Carriere’s Skokomish Style Basket lined with Cedar Paper & paper samples.

Where Kara and I live, in the Pacific Northwest of North America, information was woven into baskets, carved into house posts and canoes, and spun into yarns for the designs in blankets. All the associated tools and teachings that come with these fine art forms, as well as many other traditional cultural practices – medicine, hunting, fishing, food preparation, food storage, navigation, rights of passage, spirituality, governing, protocols for how to live together in a highly complex civilization – all the material technologies and cultural practices were vehicles for the transfer of information in the Oral cultures that have existed here for over 10,000 years, without ever needing to invent paper.

Michelle using the dipping technique
Michelle using the dipping technique.
Melissa Streun and her granddaughter adding flower petals to cedar paper.

So when a new technological break-through was developed in China, about 2,000 years ago – shredding silk and plant fibers; cooking, beating or rotting them; mixing them together in a big vat with water; molding the fibers in a new way onto a support that allows the water to drain; drying the newly formed sheet – this new technology yielded a material with an excellent surface for storing information.

Clay or Bamboo tablets, Papyrus laminations, Parchment from cow, goat or sheep hides, Vellum from lamb or calf skins – these all came to be less used over time as this new technology crept from Eastern Civilizations towards the Western World.

Cousins Ed Carriere & Darlene Peters ready to mold their first paper.

So here we are, because we are resilient. And we all know that learning, adapting, and being open to relatively new ideas, like paper making, can be quite fun!

These are some glimpses from two-days of creative people learning from each other and enjoying the process. Images were taken by Kara Horton and myself.

Ed molds Cedar Paper using the dipping method.
Darlene makes Cedar paper
Darlene molds Cedar paper.
Donna using the pouring technique
Donna using the pouring technique with mixed grass/leaf pulp.
Kaitlin molding cedar paper
Kaitlyn molding cedar paper.
Michelle removes water from her paper
Michelle presses the water out of her paper.
Darlene changing the wet couching cloths
Darlene changes the wet couching cloths for dry cloths.
Making paper from plants is fun!
Making paper from plants is fun!
We use modern tools like the helpful blender
We use modern tools to make our slurry, like the helpful kitchen blender!
Ed makes paper from his nettle scraps
Ed makes paper from nettle scraps collected from his projects.
Kaitlin includes copper foil in her cedar paper
Kaitlyn embeds copper foil as she pours cedar slurry onto her mold.
The youngest among us makes the coolest papers
The youngest among us makes the coolest papers!
Flower petal inclusions in grass/leaf paper
Flower petal inclusions frame Michelle’s paper.
Darlene’s Life Mask needs a new look
Darlene’s plaster cast Life Mask made years ago is ready for a new look.
The next step is adding cedar paper
The next step is adding her cedar paper.
Darlene fuses the cedar paper to her masks
Darlene fuses the cedar paper to her masks using Methyl cellulose glue.
Michelle forms a paper bowl with lots of flower petals included
Michelle forms a paper bowl with lots of flower petals included.
Port Gamble S’Klallam & Suquamish Paper Makers – Sept 2021

I wish we thought to get a group shot before Melissa and her granddaughter had to leave, but here are the rest of us at the end of a wonderful weekend of learning together.

Melissa and her granddaughter
Melissa and her granddaughter

Like many other art forms, making paper is a transformative process. We are learning to recognize that plants have fibers which help to give structure to some plants, or that transport the food, minerals and the water in other types of plants and trees.

Kara and Julia
Kara is an encouraging teacher as Julia molds a circle of cedar paper.

We are learning that the scraps from our basket making, and the plants that grow around us, and even some of the materials we put into our composts, can be used to make interesting papers if we take the time to isolate the cellulose fibers through cooking.

We’ve learned that paper can be made from plants without the use of chemicals, even though most books suggest using them.

Donna Jones includes flower petals in this poured paper.
Donna Jones includes flower petals in this poured paper.

We are learning that humble plant fibers can be broken down, beaten, and then put back together in a beautiful way, making something useful and beautiful. The possibilities are limited only by our imaginations!

“We made the world we are living in, and we have to make it over.”  James Baldwin

How about we keep on learning together, and let’s make our lives and our world more resilient!

Thank you for listening.

Paper Examples
Paper Examples

 

 

 

Filed Under: Artistic Uses of Plant Fibers, Artwork, Community, News, Plants and Places, Students, Workshops

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About Melinda

Forty years ago, while sitting on the beach playing with my young children, I made my first basket out of a pile of willow trimmings someone had tossed there. It looked wildly made like a crazy bird’s nest. While being together with my two sons on a beautiful Pacific Northwest shoreline, this simple experience of crafting with the natural materials at hand kindled a passion for creating forms using plant fibers. I thank my family, my community, and all my teachers for cultivating this gift in me.
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