In this workshop, we connect with the land and deepen relationships with plantcestral knowledge through hand papermaking. JuPong will share her contemplative papermaking practice, beginning with a deep listening plant walk and ethical harvest of plant friends, listening for who gives us permission to use their leaves or stems for making paper pulp. We will couch the wet paper on windows and/or glass, and people can come back in a day or two to take the paper you made (or requests can be made to mail the paper for those who live at a distance from Bramble Farm).
The embodied experiences of hand papermaking—preparing the pulp, pulling sheets and couching sheets to dry—invokes a mindbodyspirit connection with these plants and their gifts. Making paper by hand slows down our experience of time and cultivates resistance to colonial urgency and the fixation on “solving problems.” Hand papermaking is a wonderful method of inquiry for exploring our relationship with plants, land, place, the life cycle of seeds and the plants that arise from them, the relationship between the creatures that disperse the seeds, human interventions into these life cycles and relationships, relationships of care and relationships that cause harm. We can explore memory: what the plants remember, how land remembers, how our memories intertwine with the memory of paper. We can inquire into the transformation of plant (life) to paper (a useful object); what is lost and what is gained in the process of transformation—is the paper alive? Did the plant “give up its life” in becoming a “useful object”? Does paper retain the medicine of the plant? How can we decenter the human narrative of loss and gain? What questions entice you in conversing with plants, people and place?
Sunday, Sept. 29, 1:00-4:00 at Bramble Hill Farm
Some photos from Papermaking at Bramble Hill sponsored by A.C.E.
