Handmade paper is matter brought to its knees. Its mess is gathered into buckets of mush that is then pigmented, sifted, poured into a mould. I push the pulp around like a painting or collage, shape it into form, and press it between absorbent layers of felt and heavy boards. The paper studio is like a communal shower, with a drain in the center of the waterproofed floor. We crank down on the wet paper; water cascades, then drips, and eventually we peel the sheets off the stack. To remove the rest of the water out of the sheets, cloths, blotters, fans, and even a dehumidifier are required. Without a way to pull the moisture from the sheets, the paper would mold and rot.
In the summer of 2024 I pulped the majority of my teenage archives—nine boxes of letters, drawings, and ephemera—to make paper.1 As a kid, I meticulously organized these materials into folders in a metal filing cabinet in my bedroom, each labeled with the corresponding name (Rachel, Alison, Melissa...). The way to manage big feelings was to store them like treasures, like secrets. I keep keeping this archive because I keep keeping it. A history of saving becomes a history to save.
What is extraordinary about making paper by hand is that the material process is so potent with kinesthetic metaphors of composting and regeneration. The process is chock-full of incredible language; in addition to beating, blending, soaking, pressing, and reconstituting the pulp, we hog the vat, make kiss offs, and couch the sheet (pronounced cooch!). What better way to rework an archive dripping with pathos? Agonies of my queer youth were met with sloppy wet pleasure.
All the works hold an intense materiality. For Ghost Friendship Bracelets, I dropped over a dozen bracelets into the wet abaca mixture during sheet formation. Once dry, the abaca sheet becomes thin and crisp but flexes around the bracelets, pulling into ripples (also known as cockles). The strings are like wriggling worms. Up close you see how hairy they are. The work is covered in pale pink spots (ladled pulp paints), and a graphite cartoon blob stares out of its hole for an eye. I have it hanging in my studio perpendicular to the wall, so it can be seen from both sides and ambient light can pass through it, activating abaca’s filmy translucency. Jutting into the room, it flies like a flag. Looking through its holes, you can see my studio walls, where other archival materials are installed.
“Memories can cohere around objects in unpredictable ways, and the task of the archivist of emotion is an unusual one,” writes Ann Cvectovich in An Archive of Feelings. She continues, “The struggle to record and preserve is exacerbated by the invisibility that often surrounds intimate life.”2 The works in my archive project conjure that pre-digital era of letter writing and note passing in the halls and on the bus, exchanges of touch crucial to my early practices in queer longing. As this work evolves in my studio, it is an increasingly immersive installation, reperforming the physicality and relationality at the heart of my practice.
Documenting my works on (and now of) paper has always stressed me out. I often feel, as many queer artists do, that I am making things that defy straightforward documentation and are meant to be experienced in person. I reached out to Chris Kendall, a warm and deeply experienced photographer of art, open to working through the technical and conceptual dilemmas of shooting handmade-paper works. Chris and I photographed Ghost Friendship Bracelets for hours and in many different ways. What’s difficult about photographing paper-pulp works, is that you’re not only photographing an image, but also a low-relief object, and many of my works also have holes and variable edges. To capture the work’s objecthood and luminosity, we photographed the work on a vertical Plexiglas apparatus that Chris built. This allows the camera to read the deckle edges separate from reading the light hitting the wall, which, in Chris’s setup, was a few feet behind the Plexi. Chris over-lit the white wall in order to easily select it as background in Photoshop, with the artwork as a clearly defined separate layer.
Texture is not merely happening at the surface, it is the work’s form—image and substrate are one uniform object. A paper work has incredibly delicate materiality that absorbs, reflects, or disperses the light depending on how the paper was made. When light illuminates abaca, some of the light passes through the translucent material, scattering it in various directions as it travels through the sheet. This can result in a diffuse or even blurry image. In the case of this piece, in order to clearly read the pulp-paint image and the work’s materiality, we placed white foamcore, just slightly larger than the artwork, behind the Plexi to block the light from passing fully through (and to prevent light from bouncing back from the lit wall behind). The gap between artwork and foamcore created a distinctive drop shadow, which accentuates the work’s physicality.
After much trial and error, we landed on a repeatable strategy. We followed many of the standard rules of photographing art: shoot with uncompressed RAW files; use a tripod, manual focus, manual white balance, a gray card; keep an eye on the camera’s histogram; and bracket the exposure. Another trick—Chris has many— is to only use one strobe light, set up at a 45-degree angle to the work. The typical use of two strobes will create cross shadows (shadows on both sides) that can cancel each other out. While the result creates more uneven light that needs to be corrected in post-processing (using a gradient to even the exposure across the paper), this technique privileges the work’s materiality. During the shoot I also fussed with artist tape to flatten buckles at the edges. In person, these undulations are what make handmade paper so incredible. In a photograph, the wrong shape or value of a shadow can be distracting.
The next day, I sat nervously beside Chris while he spent patient hours color correcting, sharpening the focus, brightening the whites, saturating here, increasing the exposure there. He would zoom in, making sure a detail was in perfect focus. For me, the process felt more like resuscitation than correction. We were trying to approximate the aliveness of the real thing, which we kept referring back to, while discussing what’s more important: the truthiness of the image or an image that is compelling. I thought of the theory hero Walter Benjamin, whose anxieties about reproduction were made famous, concerned that the “aura” of a work of art would be lost forever. What would Walter Benjamin think of Instagram? “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”3
After working with Chris, I found myself defending Walter Benjamin for the first time in my life. My work requires in-the-flesh, slow, and close looking, drooling over every sweet, pulpy inch. One needs to move around the paper works; experience their subtle shifts in color, texture, opacity, thickness, and surface; peek through their holes and travel along their variable edges. Feel your body, notice your breath. Wet mush is now dried skin. Handmade-paper works are not things to look at, but to look with, feel with.
What was once a process of alchemical healing and artistic skill building was now a full-blown existential panic about annihilation. If seen only in photographic reproduction, my work (and by extension, I too) will become submerged in the infinite sea of digital garbage. If I’m re-enacting the marginalized other, does this mean I’m making photography the oppressor!? Eek. I needed to get a grip.
“Queer archives...are composed of material practices that challenge traditional conceptions of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science.”4 If this project is not about preserving history or knowledge but exploring a feeling or a need, how can the photo hold all of this affective density? I realize that a familiar mourning process is underway, one that is not unlike the archive’s original and rather creative defense against loss. It is not Benjamin’s aura of the original that I fear losing; after all this is an archive of relationships where there is no clear origin of meaning. It occurs to me that the digital reproductions speak to the losses already there, already inevitable.
Written after his mother’s death, Roland Barthes’ now famous Camera Lucida is as much a reflection on death as it is on photography. He became obsessed with a photo of his mother at age 5. The art historian Margaret Olin explains “Camera Lucida dwells on the ‘that-has-been’ ofthe photograph.”5 The photo, in its aims to capture something that existed in real time and space, always speaks to something no longer existing. Through this lens, photography has proven wildly successful at transmitting the negative affects of my archive.
Cori Olinghouse, an artist, archivist, and curator working with performance and time-based media, reminded me that “the archivist’s work should not be about fidelity or
accuracy. It’s about looking to see how an archive performs and creating new scores that potentiate other forms—making offshoots, multiplying possibilities, making something adjacent. In this way, we can play productively with failure to fully represent something. Acknowledging impossibility opens up other value systems. I’m advocating for misrepresentation.”6
I’m brought back to my longtime love of the writer Sara Ahmed, who persistently asks “What’s the use?” When objects fail to perform within the narrow constraints of our utilitarian aims, we fail to see what’s possible. In Ahmed’s call for a queering of use, what are all the possible uses of an artwork’s documentation, and what other possible forms of documentation might exist? As an interdisciplinary artist who works in time-based mediums, I decided to document the paper works using video’s ability to engage the body more sensorially and durationally. In a one-minute video, I am able to present more of the phenomenology and relationality of paper. I begin with a wide-angle shot of the work as an installation, then slowly move in close to see details, like the tiny embedded hairs in the abaca. I show both sides of work, peek through its holes, and show the work as an environment, creating more context. I also juxtapose tripod shots with handheld video, which produces a sense of intimacy and immediacy.7
Works that trouble representation should stay close to the trouble; it is here that we potentiate new forms. My sense is that I kept everything every girl gave me because the density of those experiences overwhelmed me. By saving their unpacking for later, I also imagined a future self capable of metabolizing my teen phantasmagoria. A parallel process is slowly unfolding with the images Chris took. Time and space open up more readings of the images. With less anxiety about losing an artwork’s original “aura,” I can see what is being communicated rather than what’s absent. I wanted to write a scathing review of photography’s failing me and the art of handmade paper, great underdogs of the artworld. However, my reenactment of documentation’s failures (as existential fear of annihilation) also reignited my ongoing striving for more forms of representation. These new desires will inevitably get translated into the next body of work.
references
Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use (2019).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980).
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935).
Tina Campt, Listening to Images (2017).
Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003).
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (1993).
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000).
Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’
Identification,” in Representations 156 (2002).
Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You (2018).
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notes
1. I made the handmade-paper works with Mina Takahashi at Round Top Paper in Delhi, NY.
2. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 242.
3. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 3. Translated into English by Harry Zohn from the 1935 essay. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf (accessed October 1, 2024).
4. Ann Cvetkovich, 268.
5. Margaret Olin, “Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification” in Touching Photographs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 101.
6. Cori Olinghouse, phone conversation with the author, July 22, 2024.
7. Video forthcoming on artist’s website, kerrydowney.com.
