Rural Matter and Energy

“What art offers is space…a certain breathing space for the spirit.”
– John Updyke

Growing up on a dairy farm in Vermont, I was the child who spent all my time outside, roaming freely and amassing a large collection of twigs, stones, and birch bark. I moved through the seasons, shoeless and happy… Spring was for planting, summer for haying and storing the bales in the barn, Fall was for bringing in the feed corn. Now I realize that the rhythm of those days was the rhythm of turning matter into energy, raising crops to feed dairy cows who energy in turn produced milk. Now the rhythm I follow is the rhythm of beating fibers, pouring pulp, dipping the mold and deckle into the watery pulp, lifting the sheets, drying the sheets, over and over and over until the energy I expend produced the matter of my art…the paper. I have lived in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, near Rittenhouse Town, where paper was first made in the United States and where I have collected the twigs and bark and stone following the rhythm of energy to matter.

“Papermaking gives me space for my spirit.”