Why Make Paper?

Why make paper? Paper shows us the in-person fleshy actuality of the world. The world’s animistic reality, filled with irreducibly unique parts, is under constant siege by skeptics of all stripes. They flatten all things into ideal types and interchangeable parts. The result is a suspicion that the things we see are not quite what they appear, and that the world might be something less than real. 

A sheet of perfectly smooth machine-made paper seeks to disappear from view and be forgotten, like a transparent background in a Photoshop file. Handmade paper can never disappear for the artist. He or she is confronted constantly by its materiality. Any desire to subdue their materials must be discarded. The textured surface of the sheet, a permanent feature from its birth between coarse woolen felts, creates the horizons of possibility. Handmade paper jolts us back into the world of real things.

People in all epochs presume their time is special. So maybe it is a personal prejudice to attribute fault to computers for our suspicions of unreality. Computer files are, in fact, completely interchangeable. A duplicate is really exactly the same as its predecessor. This gives us the illusion that they do not really live in our world. We reflect this in our speech: they descend from The Cloud like bodiless angels. Their life in the world, in physical cobalt and silicon (wrenched from the earth with picks and shovels) is obscured from our everyday experience.

Computer files and programs are, within their domains, perfectly interchangeable parts. But the concept predates them by centuries. A computer program might take the firing pin of a mass-produced rifle as its archetype. But interchangeable parts cannot be the origin either. The writing of a JPEG resembles more closely a scribe with tremendous speed and accuracy. Written language, too, is interchangeable. Could this be our genesis?

Must we go back to the commandment: believe not your lyin’ eyes, for your kingdom is not of this world? Monotheism demands a contempt for matter. God spoke the world into existence, and The Word is the only truth that can be relied upon, they say. You must reject the little gods that you find everywhere, whether you see them in the unquenchable will for existence found in fruiting mushrooms, or the unique and irreducible essence possessed even in stones. 

Do not think secularism escapes this impulse so easily. The adherent of naive scientism, more common these days than the monotheist, might tell you that the universe is information—that matter’s essential composition can be discovered as information and therefore be recordable. They even imagine their own minds as a collection of quantifiable traits awaiting upload to the cloud. Laws of physics and properties of elements, quantifiable and recordable, are all that substance is. So they might say.

These properties hint at the real essences of things. Cobalt, atomic number 27, behaves completely differently from number 26, iron. There’s a reason why you can’t make cobalt blue pigment or lithium-ion batteries from iron, and you can’t make iron-oxide red or steel girders from cobalt. These things contain, in their essence, properties that can’t be faked. Science can tell us some of the how, but the why is completely untouched. Why should one more proton create this galaxy of difference? That’s just the way it is.

Here I take my leap of faith. I exhort you to do the same: believe your eyes when you find fleshy, living matter in front of them. 

So why make handmade paper? It is a transformation that enacts the wonder and mystery of the world. With stinking, worm eaten, moldering rags, we make something beautiful and unrepentantly unique. 

When the second and equally unlikely transformation occurs—the creation of a drawing or painting with crushed stones and bones—handmade paper does not permit you to forget its origin or to presume its interchangeability. The texture of the felts can never repeat. The unique flaws and features of any particular sheet can never be recreated. Handmade paper brings the work of art down from its rarified heights back into the world.