In the hands of Alexis Granwell, Megan Singleton, and Jennifer Davies, paper is transformed from passive surface, on which meaning is displayed, into objects that bear meaning and activate the spaces in which they are displayed. The tactile possibilities of the papermaking medium are emphasized in different ways by these artists. They all work abstractly, though they will tell you they are inspired by forms and movement in nature—whether moving figures, swinging tree branches, or rushing water. As Granwell says, “[Papermaking is] an endless rabbit hole of play and experimentation.”1

The sculptures of Alexis Granwell merge animate, elusive forms with crisply structural pedestals in a profound exploration of artwork and context. Her painterly vessels so closely follow the contours of the pedestals that they merge and blur the roles of artwork and stand. Are the pedestals for the art or part of the art? In an exhibition, the works are arrayed so that the style of the works is not so much a visual link as it is a bond between exemplars.

Megan Singleton says, “My art making process begins when I open the map and choose a location to explore.”2 In her chosen landscape she will research the native and invasive plants. Her exhibitions are distillations of aesthetic and telling conclusions from painstaking fieldwork and botanical observation.

Jennifer Davies makes dexterous use of her materials—she layers, sews, and dyes her papers, collaging them into unconventional pieces. “Creating with paper feels like dancing as I follow the lead of the material through a series of steps. I start with an idea, but give myself over to a process that’s intuitive and playful.”3 Davies, who lives in Connecticut, makes abstract paper wall works. Texture and pattern play starring roles in her work. She often prints, paints, or draws on her papers to add a strong graphic element. Davies uses drawing as a starting point, abstracting landscapes or figures so that the viewer is left with a mere sensation of the original.

She discovered papermaking at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York and at the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven.4 Asian fibers became her chosen material partly because she could make pulp from them anywhere, no beater required, only a mallet. The long, strong fibers of her paper lend themselves to being sewn together or stretched wide apart as in Shimmer (2020), which holds the wall beautifully in her gallery exhibit, evocative of both the sky and the sea.

Davies brings her experiences of making her artwork to her viewers. She is inspired by road-repair tar snakes. The slithering, dramatic, fast/slow, awkward/graceful curves have led her to treat area parking lots (with permission) as giant printing plates. She brings her damp handmade papers and inks up the tar snakes to hand print them. In her studio she collages her prints into large works before sewing everything together.5

Davies explains, “I often make several layers using some transparent sheets with no image on them to blur and soften some of the lines.”6 As in Keeping Track (2017), the results emphasize or confuse what is on them producing dramatic changes in translucence and value, creating a gestural work that twists, flows, stutters, whispers, and keeps on.

For her two-person show “Amicizia, the Long Arc” in June 2024, Davies made works that combine pulp painting with stencils, monotype, and painting on handmade papers.7 She says that the works are “printed or dyed with indigo or kakishibu, both traditional Japanese dyes. I treat my work as a textile, so use stitching and other techniques to combine them.”8 The three pieces in Silent Translations (2024), made especially for this exhibition, juxtapose coarse web-like bark fibers with silky kozo sheets. The painted designs echo the twist and pull of the fibers that seem to emanate from the paper itself.

With Facets (2009), Davies makes use of linen wetlap, a tough and absorbent commercial fiber. She takes advantage of its high wet strength by triangle folding paper

strips, then soaking them in pigment for days. She then allows the papers to dry before unfolding, refolding, and soaking them again.9 The gorgeous results are undulating tapestries with ragged ends and a seductive depth of color. Small works hang beside much larger ones allowing the sharp shift in scale to add tension to adjacent works of similar content and color.

Like Davies, Saint Louis–based artist Megan Singleton often builds her large works from smaller elements that repeat. For her exhibition titled “Surface Tension,” Singleton created an immersive wall installation titled Interchange: An Average of Eighteen (2015). One can almost feel the tide rushing out across the wall with the work’s repetitive arcs and violent gestures. The exhibition reflected Singleton’s experience while on residency in Eastport, Maine, where she encountered the tremendous tidal changes–eighteen feet of water coming in and out of the Passamaquoddy Bay daily to hide and reveal the varying landscape below.

In many of her projects Singleton researches the ecological concerns of places such as the sand dunes in southern Colorado and the bayous in southern Louisiana. She often partners with botanists to study invasive plants. Her installations transform a gallery by the use of varied and linear bifurcating patterns and the broad repetition of forms. In 2018, Singleton worked with the horticulture staff at the Missouri Botanical Garden, to choose and gather plants of 20 different species to make sheets of paper from each.10 She later bound the sheets together into an oversized book entitled Plant Transformations, Observations, and Interactions (2019), which she displayed lying open in the Garden’s nineteenth-century hall of specimens. It is an artifact memorializing our Linnean knowledge of gardens. In the gallery space, Singleton curates her works for grand effect to bring the artworks into dialog with the viewer by blurring the line between art object and a display of specimens.

For her 2017 exhibition “Fluvial Terra,” Singleton created an immersive installation of wall works and kinetic paper and steel plant-like sculptures. Four sheets dyed blue and reddish brown are mimicked by a row of sticks on the adjacent wall standing like a fence, the bottom several inches dipped in dye as if pulled from a muddy shore. The kinetic sculptures, Turions: Wintering Buds, stand watchful in the middle of the exhibition space, as they gently sway in the wake of passing viewers.

Alexis Granwell’s sculptures also activate the space they occupy but in a very different way. Based in Philadelphia, Granwell uses papier-mâché, steel, wood, fabric, and more to create sculptures that seem to remain loosely pliant atop sturdy, elegant pedestals. Focusing on process and materials, her gestural works feel the effects of gravity while the pedestals of rigid angles make an unyielding foil of the manmade. Often the pedestal barely has enough space to hold its object. The object joins its pedestal, balancing there just so, carefully stacked.

Granwell explored papermaking while working at Dieu Donné in New York City on a research grant.11 She was especially inspired by the possibilities of pulp painting and laminate sheet casting. “The pulp is so responsive, absorbing my movements as I work, and can be printed, stenciled, sprayed, and layered to create complex surfaces that transform the paper in exciting ways.”12

Granwell’s works are both at rest and not at rest, languid and strongly fluid. In a grouping of her sculptures for “Fields and Formations,” a 2021 group exhibition at the American University Museum in Washington, DC, Gently Outwards spouts its contents as it pitches off balance. Looking On with its heavy folds offers a large loopy handle for easy hefting. Both emanate a constant tension between hard-edged, crisp support, and the evocative, inchoate forms they are forced to uphold. So, when Full Bloom is shown without its pedestal it is like a surprise. With its green arms akimbo, the form comes across as archly ambivalent on the subject of stands. In any event, one is certain that her paper forms shouldn’t be left alone for fear of the artist coming back momentarily to rework a part here and drip color onto an area there.

In the 2019 group show “Intimate Immensity” that she curated for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum in Philadelphia, Granwell included a grouping of her sculptures. The sharp angles and clean edges of her pedestals play off the spare horizontal and vertical confines of the staid white cube of a gallery. The pedestals also lend an elegance and seriousness to her lively paper works. The predominantly light color of the paper surfaces allows her paper objects to lighten and seem to pause. In her 2022 solo show titled “Two Points in the Sky,” Granwell arranges the same works in a lush outdoor garden space. The tight grouping gives way to a looser array. The pedestals show off the fluid natural rhythms of the artworks they support. And the works are enhanced rather than subsumed by the rich variety of greens of the setting. When asked about making work for the outdoors, she didn’t wonder about weather-proofing her work, but instead how to “embrace the destruction of the piece.”13

Abstract art is often seen as a recognizable language the viewer happens not to know, perpetuating the sense of exclusion tinged with disdain or indifference that too many still feel when encountering it. These artists are making inroads to abstraction with tactile, engrossing, unbound work in paper that draws the viewer closer, to linger and become interested, then inspired to seek to understand. They know how to break the stride of viewers even those for whom abstract art doesn’t look like anything. Davies puts familiar parts together to make something wholly un- familiar; Singleton leads us from the facts to the sublime; and Granwell combines the fabricated with the conjured.

Authors’ note: For more on these three artists, please visit their websites: JenniferDaviesHMP.com; AlexisGranwell.studio; MeganSingleton.com.

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notes

1. Alexis Granwell, interview with Amy Boone-McCreesh, “Studio Visit–Alexis Granwell, June 22, 2022, by Inertia Studio Visits,” https://

inertiastudiovisits.com/2022/06/22/studio-visit-alexis-granwell/.

2. Megan Singleton, email interview with Barbara Landes, Fall 2014, https://www.barbaralandes.com/megan-singleton.

3. Jennifer Davies, in Brian Slattery, “Artists Share a Formal Attraction,” New Haven Independent, June 27, 2024, https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/city_gallery_june_2024.

4. Curatorial statement for “Material World,” exhibition at Flinn Gallery, Greenwich Library, Greenwich, Connecticut, September 10–October 28, 2020, https://flinngallery.com/material-world/.

5. Allen Appell, “City Gallery finds the Art in Parking Lots,” New Haven Independent, March 14, 2017, https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/paper_city_gallery.

6. Jennifer Davies, email to the authors, January 15, 2025.

7. Jennifer Davies, email to the authors, May 29, 2024.

8. Jennifer Davies, in Brian Slattery, “Artists Share a Formal Attraction.”

9. Jennifer Davies, email to the authors, June 26, 2024.

10. For more, see the artist’s website, MeganSingleton.com/planttransformations.html.

11. Alexis Granwell, interview with Amy Boone-McCreesh.

12. Ibid.

13. Alexis Granwell, email to the authors, June 20, 2024.

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