Signal studio residency: making silk fibre paper

In June I had taken a Zoom workshop, with artist Tunde Toth, on silk fibre papermaking (which I blogged about here) and immediately knew I planned to make more of the paper for my printmaking when taking up studio residency at Signal Arts Centre come autumn. Well, that time came fast enough and I spent the first week (plus a bit of the second week) focussed on making silk fibre paper. One of the first things for me to do, then, was set up a work station: spreading a clean table cloth over the table, having water bottle spritzer filled, iron to hand, scissors, ruler, bag of silk fibre, parchment paper roll, small dry brushes, pigments, and strips of Fabriano paper that I planned to use as inclusions.

I had the ruler to measure the sheets of parchment, as I wanted the finished pieces to be large enough to show off the paper and to carry a small print in its centre. I had two types of silk fibre: "carded coccoon strippings" and "throwsters". I actually don't know which is which, but one is like angel hair and the other is more like cotton batten. The process is simple - pull/tear the fibre to form a shape on the surface of the parchment.

If one is using "inclusions" (i.e. elements that are not silk fibre) - in my pages I decided to use small, torn pieces of Fabriano paper - 

they must be sandwiched between layers of fibre.

Sometimes I used a mix of silk fibres (with inclusions of paper)

and for other pages I used just one type of fibre, again here I added the paper inclusions.

Though it is hard to see in this picture, I included some really soft coloured fibres in this piece.

This piece is made of a sandwich of one type of fibre with paper inclusions. It is at this stage that pigment may be sprinkled/flicked onto the fibre with a small, dry paintbrush. This is an enjoyable process, but you have to be happy to give away control, as the effects of the pigments are full of randomness (going through the processes of flicking, spritzing, and ironing to mix at their own inclination).

When the "sandwich" is complete, the next step is to spritz the entire "page".

Cover with another sheet of parchment and gently, with the palm of your hand, rub the water into the fibres. It will be apparent what areas are wet. Turn the whole thing over and rub on the other side too, spritzing a bit more if necessary.

On high, but not steam, heat iron lightly. It is the water and heat that releases a natural glue, serecin, from the silk fibres, which binds the fibres together to form a paper. As you can see from the photo, I am only lightly holding the iron, allowing it to glide slowly on the surface with its own weight. You can actually hear the water sizzling!

When finished ironing (about 5 mins) peel back the top layer carefully. If the paper still seems too wet, iron some more, but if it is mostly dry, carefully peel the whole page from the parchment.

It can finish drying on a clean piece of paper or blotting paper. This is a finished sheet of textured, undyed, silk fibre paper, with Fabriano paper inclusions. It is ready to be printed on.

I had enough silk fibre material to make 20 sheets of paper, so I experimented with colour pigments, different inclusions, and also set up another table with blotting paper to place damp but finished pieces on.

Here are some of the finished pages using different pigments and in the yellow piece on the left I used a dry, fibrous green inclusion.

Signal studio residency 2020

I started my third studio residency at Signal Arts Centre last week and already I feel very much at home in the space, despite arriving masked and chatting to people with coronavirus protocols in place. I had residencies in the studio in both the fall of 2018 and the fall of 2019, so being here is becoming a pleasant annual habit. I blogged about the work done (or started) in both those residencies here and here, and as with those residencies I decided beforehand what my focus would be during my time in this studio. But first things first: after a simple tidy and sweep, I rearranged and covered tables to correspond with how I intended to work. I saw that one of the previous tenants had put the long mirror horizontally behind one of the sink areas (there are two) and I thought this would be a convenient spot for my daily self-portrait, a work warm-up for me. Since I don't actually need two sinks, I simply covered this sink with a wooden board to create another surface area.

I have use of the portable press till the end of the year, so it got its own table between the larger window and the sink that I would be using. My focus this year is to be on silk-fibre papermaking - a process that I learned a few months ago in zoom workshops provided by artist Tunde Toth. I blogged about this workshop here. I planned to make some paper and use it for monoprints related to my current body of work Memory Is My Homeland, which I have blogged about here, here, here, here, here and here.

So I started work well before lunchtime. This is my first self-portrait of the week, done with watercolour pencil.

As I knew I would not be ready for printing this week, and always feel that I should do at least three different things in the studio daily, I brought materials to make collage cards. Thinking of my recent work on Aos Dara-Umha Aois Combined Symposium, which I blogged about here, here and here, I created a collage card based on my memory of the saplings and ferns at the entrance to Tomnafinnoge Wood.

By the end of the week, I had used up most of my silk fibre supplies, but happily so. I made a number of sheets that are raw in colour and I also made some sheets using dry pigments to give intense colours.

Here are some of the sheets fully drying on blotting paper. I look forward to printing on them soon!

silk fibre papermaking - zoom workshop

I signed up for a papermaking workshop, which took place by Zoom two Saturday mornings in June. I was really excited by this for several reasons: to see if one could do a workshop over the internet (having never done this before), to learn a new process, to see if this process would feed into my own artmaking. Although I have made paper before, by hand, I was completely unfamiliar with silk fibre as a material, and as the tutor explained to me by email, this was a different process than making paper with wood pulp. The artist facilitator Tunde Toth, was based in another county to me, so I would not have signed up for the workshop had it been live at her studio. I was quite excited when the parcel of materials arrived in the post: two types of silk fibre, two packages of dye, two cards of different coloured threads, a sample paper decoration and some sheets of of parchment paper. 

The items I needed to have available for the course included an iron, a spritzer bottle of water, a small paintbrush, some paper or card, and a table cloth covered workspace. I knew I would be working in the kitchen, and the first Sat morning, set up my workspace appropriately.

On the first morning, Toth went over the basics and we made a sample decoration. On the second morning we were shown how to use the dyes in this process, again making a small decoration: with a dry brush dye was sprinkled before the piece was spritzed and ironed between parchment pages.

We then experimented with different types of "inclusions", i.e., items sandwiched between silk fibres (which contain a natural glue). First I used something natural - a very dry mini daffodil. Please note, it is important when using plant inclusions that they be completely dry. I used two dyes in small amounts. Since one is gently flicking the dried dye powder onto the silk prior to spritzing and ironing, the result is random (including mixing of dyes) and one just let's go of any ideas of control. I really enjoy this!

I had some small strips of Fabriano paper, so for another inclusion test I decided to rip them into smaller bits and keep the white-on-white look.

I had a tube of tiny coloured acetate star sequins so made a test piece with this non-natural material and I flicked a fair amount of the pink dye on for a more intense look.

I really enjoyed using silk fibres to make paper and the process is very simple to master. With that in mind, I immediately ordered a larger starter kit (containing more dyes, extra inclusions and larger amounts of the two types of raw silk). Although I am busy with other projects at the moment, I have ideas for making unique silk fibre papers this autumn.