Art in the Weather World: An Artists collaboration with Climate Change Science: March 2019

Paper cloud displayed in window at Bowlees Visitor Centre Gallery, Upper Teesdale

Paper clouds and other sculptures and how to make them

Here are a couple of videos on two of the many steps in the process of making paper clouds and other sculptures from dead moorland grasses collected in the late winter early spring.

After collecting out in the moors, a couple of months of partial rotting in a plastic bag and cutting to short lengths the grass is cooked in a solution of sodium bi-carbonate for several hours which stinks the studio out. This starts to break apart and digest the cellulose fibres.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOYH07CTNO4

After mashing the cooked grass with a pestle and mortar the broken down cellulose is washed and then bathed in dilute bleach to lighten the colour before a final rinse in cold water.

The pulp is then ready to store in airtight containers until needed for pouring into a paper cloud on a paper making screen or onto silk screen printing mesh. The paper is left on the screen to either air dry for a day or so, or to fast dry with a current of warm air passing over it for an hour or more. Faster drying will make the paper cockle and bend more dramatically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_vDUYaYvmE&t=21s

Once dry, if the paper hasn't released itself from the screen, a small curved knife blade is very gently run under the delicate edges until it lifts off.

Some of these paper clouds are very fragile at the edges but the thinness of the paper in these parts helps create a brighter silver lining when back lit. This scattering effect is enhanced when the cellulose fibres are finer which depends on the amount of cooking, mashing and bleaching and on the types of grass used.

Paper pulp can be used to make almost any 3-D object out of a skin of paper such as this model of a 25 micron wide birch pollen grain exhibited at Baltic 39 in Newcastle upon Tyne and at Brantwood, Coniston in 2015.

Birch pollen paper sculpture, Baltic 39, Newcastle upon Tyne

Birch pollen paper sculpture and paper cloud, Brantwood, Coniston

Here's my final composition (I think) for the 'Tropos 3' collage-painting. I've added a few little cumulus clouds on the right and I've developed what was a weak area in the sea on the right using a sword liner, a water spray-mister and a shaper tool. The risk in art is to go too far and loose the magic by over doing things, such as adding too much detail or complexity where simpler might be more effective through suggestion. It's probably too early for me to judge whether this is an improvement or not but if you don't follow your hunches with paintings they can miss their expressive potential. I think we have to follow creative instinct: if after a few weeks the painting is saying "more to be done" then it has to be changed somehow. It could be small changes or it might have to be a radical rethink, but things evolve over time and its hard to know if the current state of the work is just intermediate, but for now this is as far as I can go.

Tropos3, acrylic and laser print on canvas.

In fact it's probably time to start several more pieces and to up the scale in order to think about the idea in different ways and get a clearer perspective on the work and what its potential is as art. I'm in discussion wit the scientists at Leipzig University about doing something much more ambitious with their TROPOS atmospheric data followed by an exhibition and a catalogue with essays. I'm hoping the Alfred Wegener Institute will be interested in supporting it and also searching for possible art-science funding from the European Union before the UK crashes out of it.

Meanwhile the oceans keep warming and absorbing acidifying CO2 and the algae and plankton populations, that affect the colour of the surface waters, continue to change, as does the weather that allows illuminating sunlight through. These paintings don't illustrate climate change science, but if they are any good as art they will help some people to contemplate the beauty of the sea and its hidden life beneath the surface as a phenomenon of great human value. I for one have always looked out on the sea with awe and wonder, seeing it as an environment of a completely different order to terrestrial landscapes in the impermanence of it and in its vitality as living thing. Human beings have always been fascinated with the sea as both dangerous alien environment but also as possible route to far away and unknown places. The memory of my particular encounter with the sea on the RV Polarstern from Bremerhaven to Cape Town will continue to feed my imagination.

Here are a few sketches and photos from the 2016 cruise. More to come in future posts when I get time!

Drawing made on Nov 14, 2016, English Channel

Super moon sketched from the monkey island at 6 in the morning as we left the English Channel for the Atlantic ocean. Chinese ink and aquarelle pencil on paper.

'Super' moon painted on board ship based on sketches and memory, acrylic on canvas.

The painting was donated to the ship to mark a successful cruise in a ceremony on the bridge with Captain Wunderlich of Polarstern when we arrived safely in Cape Town, Dec 12th 2016.