artist's statement
Ellen Mears Kennedy: Paper, Thread and Ink
Cox Gallery @Drury University April 2003
My work as an artist began with weaving. When I was in college I studied both fiber art and printmaking. Every time I made a print, I looked at the paper. My handmade felt was a non woven fabric just like paper. After graduate school I began to pursue paper making as a bridge between these two disciplines of fiber and print. Handmade paper can be approached flat much like a print or as paint or or sculptural. Sometimes the paper is the surface for receiving the marks of an artist, sometimes the paper is the mark itself.
For almost two decades now I have been working with paper. This current show includes work from the mid-90's when I began to use my handmade paper in modular units to create the large dimensional wall reliefs on exhibit here. My most recent mixed media pieces incorporate intaglio printmaking and other materials. A tribute to the craft of costume design (my mother was dedicated to the art), they are mostly sewn together, both by hand and by machine, all on a substrate of my own paper.
All paper starts with the pulp. I use a blend of recycled cotton and abaca, a plant from the Philippines. These two fibers are beaten together in a Hollander beater until they are of the right consistency. Then pigment is added to the pulp.
When I am working on the three dimensional wall pieces, my studio is filled with dozens of buckets of pigmented pulp. I make each piece of paper by hand using two colors on each side which requires 3 molds and 3 separate dips into the two vats. With each strip of paper I make, I add a small amount of a new color to each vat. The color slowly changes with each dip.
After pressing, the strips are hung to air dry which allows the paper to cockle and wave. The dry paper strips are folded, arranged in patterns and attached to a canvas backing. When the piece is complete, one color can be seen from the left and another color from the right. The art work is always changing as the viewer moves from one side to another of the piece. These wall hung pieces are meant to be visual meditations on the ceaseless movement of time and our experience. If there are any recognizable images, they are of doorways which take us from one experience to another.
My mixed media pieces or constructed collages are also about time and our experience of the moments and movement of time. As artists, we use art to reconstruct our lives, to bring order out of chaos, and to to bring play to work. There is a delight in placing each texture, color and line.
Several years ago I received an artist's grant from the State of Maryland that allowed me to buy a Bernina sewing machine. I began to take my handmade papers and cut them and sew them back together. I now include fabric pieces, fabric that I wove myself, or fabric that resonates with memories. I scavenge from my daughters' bead collections, from my own graduate school etchings, my father's old ties.
The printing and the sewing are both players in the game. The shapes arrive from cutting, tearing, thinking and designing; the titles arrive from the shapes. I am still working with doorways, ladders, gates and the occasional Greek myth. (Ariadne was the princess of Crete who helped Theseus defeat the Minotaur.) I am conscious of contrast, the dark and the light, the hard and the soft. For as in nature we experience the change in the hours and the seasons, in our lives we experience the flow of events. My collage works are like calendars to mark the time, to record the moment and then to turn the page.