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Visual and Communication Art News
Art Prof Finds The Rhythm
By Luanne Austin, Daily News-Record
Barbara P. Fast is a patient woman.She’s learned patience by making paper. Her most recent project takes days and days to make a few sheets.
The fruits of her patience, hard work and artistic instincts can be seen in an exhibit called "Cooking with Kozo: A Release Time Project in Asian Papermaking" at Eastern Mennonite University.
Sounds more like a cooking show. But kozo is a paper fiber, the most common paper fiber in Japan.
"I’ve done papermaking for 20 years using Western methods, working with cotton fibers and abaca," says Fast, a professor of art at EMU for 15 years. "But kozo’s crisp paper, reduced scale and color palette pushed me in another direction."
The result is Asian art with a Western touch. The exhibit, in four groupings, includes calligraphic figures, collage and three-dimensional designs in bold, basic colors.
"There’s such a difference between the Western and Asian processes," says Fast.
Kozo is concocted from the inner bark of the mulberry bush, which is grown specifically for paper fiber.
Fast first soaks the raw material, cooks it for several hours in an alkali bath, rinses it thoroughly, then beats it to a pulp. One pound of raw material took three hours to beat with large wooden sticks.
After adding pigment to the pulp, she dips ("pulls") a sugeta (a small hinged frame lined with a fine bamboo screen) into a vat of kozo, then throws off the kozo. A thin layer remains, which she shakes around to distribute the fibers. Then she pulls the frame again and throws it off again. Fast does this eight to ten times, depending on the desired thickness.
In western papermaking, there’s only one pull.
"It took me a long time to get the rhythm," says Fast. "At one point I thought, I’m not getting this."
Each sheet of paper requires days of drying time, says Fast.
"I discovered that when something takes time and involves this much hand labor, there’s an appreciation for the rhythm of the process," says Fast. "And all the patience pays off when I peel the smooth, crisp sheets off the drying board."
The product is unlike anything she’d ever made before.
"The paper was so thin and crisp," says Fast. "It made me want to do other things with it. I found myself adapting to Asian art."
Kozo is unique in that the whole plant is used in the papermaking process.
After removing the bast, or inner bark, the rest of the plant is used for fuel and cooking ash. The alkaline in the ash is alkaline, which is the catalyst that separates the cellulose from the wood.
Japanese farmers once relied on papermaking for winter income. In the early 1900s, there were about 70,000 papermaking families in Japan. The Industrial Revolution ushered in faster, more efficient methods, and the number dropped to 700 by 1979. The number is even less now.
Kozo paper is used for art, fine books, screens and clothing, says Fast.
Fast first saw a demonstration of the process at a Chinese arts exhibit in British Columbia. Then, last spring, she was awarded release time to learn about Asian papermaking.
She plans to teach kozo as part of her spring papermaking classes.
