One of my readers last week, Don, commented that he would like to see photos that showed more of the 3-D aspect of my experiments with handmade paper, palm-bark, and wire. I appreciated his suggestion because I was taking the photo straight on, like I would with a painting, and I had not thought about an angle that showed the elements that are not flat.

So here is the plaited piece mounted on a small, barely seen, square canvas.

 

In the work that combines a painted piece that has cut-outs along with the paper and bark, the painted paper is secured flat onto the black backing. The handmade paper is mostly flat, but the edges curl up from the board and there is a part of the paper that arches over the painted piece and leaves a shadow.

 

 

The bark-cloth is attached to the handmade paper in only a few places, allowing the way it dried when I collected it, to provide all the action in this work.

 

 

The third item made this summer, started out with a large handmade paper with extremely irregular edges, probably made with the last of the pulp on a large oval shaped screen.

There wasn’t enough pulp to cover the screen. Being larger than the other paper I made, this piece has been sitting on top of the box for a very long time.

I threaded three lengths of thin copper wire across the paper so that I could shape the paper by bending the wire. I rolled up the two sides toward each other sort of like a scroll. In the lower center, I glued on a small wind-lashed piece of bark. This bark is all connected together by strong fibers even though it appears to be three small pieces.

Cleaning up under a crape myrtle tree a few days before starting this series, I had brought into the studio feathers and rolls of bark found under this tree.  Since I hadn’t put these things away, and I was cleaning up the work table, they were added to the piece.

Of course, this item was too fragile to remain unmounted. I went on a search for something to use for a background. A piece of watercolor paper I had played with using a stencil and sponge painting caught my attention as I rummaged for something blue among sheets of past experiments.

I glued the blue paper to some heavy cardboard, and the handmade paper with its wire and bark was attached with gel medium.

The really fun part of all this is getting to use all the old, used, anybody else would have thrown it away, stuff I have in my stash!