Making the Paper Cut: Fitchburg Art Museum explores manufacturing past with 'Paper Town'

The “Paper Town” exhibition at Fitchburg Art Museum celebrates the city’s paper manufacturing past, but it’s no run-of-the-mill show.

The artwork, by contemporary artists who use paper as their primary medium, ranges from a two-story tall intricately cut installation highlighted by a glowing LED tube to several pieces by an artist whose work with paper art is, quite literally, encyclopedic.

The show, which opened in February and runs through June 4, is the final installment of a three-part series spanning several years that links contemporary art practice with the region’s industrial heritage. In 2016, “Plastic Imagination” featured objects made primarily out of plastic and, in 2018, “Interior Effects," through studio furniture, sculpture, and video, paid homage to the area’s furniture-making legacy.

“Paper Town” features nine artists or artist groups (one of the ‘artists’ is a father/son duo), each of whom have, depending on the size of the work, from two to seven pieces in the show.

In organizing the exhibition, FAM Curator Lauren Szumita said she tried to consider the myriad ways paper could be used. “I kept thinking about the word ‘transformation,’ like how paper as a material is transformed in some way in the creation of the work,” she said. “We have some artists who used paper pulp. They take the fibers and beat them down into a pulp and then create sculpture out of that. Some of the artists work with cut paper, so you start with a machine-made flat sheet and do cuttings and then create various things with that. A few of the artists do an assemblage type thing.”

One artist, Wendy Wahl, takes pages out of encyclopedias then stacks them up into graceful arches or arranges rolled up pages into appealing painterly abstractions. Utterly transformed in their new Wahl-wrought incarnations, their origins are nevertheless, with a touch of nostalgic reverence perhaps, noted in the museum wall labels - from Encyclopedia Britannica to the less lofty Funk and Wagnalls.

“We just don’t use encyclopedias anymore, so her art makes you think about how the ways we consume information have changed and how it’s gone from paper to digital,” Szumita said. “So, the way that paper is used in the show is very varied and, that was kind of the point.”

All the artists are from New England. In addition to Wahl, of Rhode Island, the exhibition includes artwork by May Babcock, Erik and Martin Demaine, Andrea Dezsö, Tory Fair, Hong Hong, Fred Liang, Michelle Samour, and Heidi Whitman.

Elements of personal histories and cultural traditions can be found in many of the pieces, including a pair of large works of handmade paper by Hong, a Chinese American artist. She traces her fondness for paper to very early memories of going to the temple with her grandmother.

“We would always kneel and pray, and then we would get up and write our wishes for the New Year on sheets of holy paper,” Hong said. “Then she would pick me up and we would tie these sheets of paper to a tree. I remember asking her: ‘Oh, does God reach down from the sky and comb through the forest?’ Or ‘Does the writing evaporate to reach God?’ So, working with paper, I have these memories of paper framed within this transcendental context, that it was capable of bridging the intangible with the tangible.”

Erik Demaine, a professor of computer science at MIT, had a more down-to-earth initiation into artmaking with paper. “I was a student at the University of Waterloo in Canada and I really liked geometry and I was looking for some cool geometry problems to solve,” he said. “This new world of computational origami was just getting off the ground and there were a couple people working in the space and I was ‘Oh origami. That sounds good and useless.’

“Then my dad (Martin Demaine, a visual artist)) and I started working in that field and one of the challenges was and still is curved creases. Straight creases are easy to understand geometrically. Curved creases — totally crazy. So, we started making models so we could see ‘How does paper fold when you fold along curves,’ and as we did so we thought the models looked pretty cool and maybe we should turn it into art.”

Computational origami can be defined as a branch of computer science that is concerned with studying algorithms for solving paper-folding problems. The Demaines’ pieces in the show are 3-D versions of mathematical inspirations turned into sculptures of colorful, controlled curves that twist and turn in on themselves in delightfully unexpected ways. They also created a floor-to-ceiling adaptation of their tabletop pieces in their first effort at creating large-scale art.

“Lauren (Szumita) asked ‘Can you do things bigger, just out of curiosity?’ And we interpreted that as ‘You must do something bigger,” Demaine said, with a laugh. He was speaking at a recent panel discussion that featured several “Paper Town” artists. “So, you’ll see some of our smaller works and our one largest piece on exhibit here. We usually work this big,” he said, holding his hands about a foot apart. “This is 20 times larger than that, so it was a very exciting new experience for us.”

Tequila-fueled hallucinations on a lonely mountaintop figured into the inspiration for Fred Liang’s 24-foot-tall installation suspended from the high ceiling in FAM’s entrance foyer. It’s made of beautiful gold paper from the Arjowiggins paper company, a maker of creative papers based in Scotland. Liang used a scherenschnitte-like approach creating intricate, finely cut designs the entire length of installation, rendering it at once delicate and imposing.

Liang said he had brought a different paper that he usually used along with him to a residency in Mexico then realized that, in effect, transporting his home studio to a new location was not the best way to take advantage of his time there.

So, he started walking around the city trying to find new material and came across the gold Arjowiggins paper, but he really didn’t quite know what to do with it at first.

Inspiration came after he set off on a hike up a sacred mountain in Mexico, unprepared for what he would find there – or rather what he wouldn’t find. “I almost died up there because I thought there was like, you know, restaurants and shops up there. But the only thing I had with me was a bottle of tequila and miles of nothingness. I started to hallucinate, and what came to my mind was that the gold paper actually in some way directly connected to why I was in the area.”

He thought of the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty that ruled China over the same time period that the Americas were being conquered by Europeans. The European conquerors were mining gold and silver in Mexico and exporting it all home to Europe – or so the usual story goes.

“But the secret to that was that the majority of the gold was actually shipped to China,” said Liang, who is Chinese American. “They were literally taking gold from that region and shipping it to the Philippines.” From there, the gold was shipped to China in exchange for tea, ceramics, and other luxuries, he said. To Liang, the gold paper signified that long-ago exchange and the connection between his heritage and the locale in which he found himself. “Everywhere I go I try to make some sort of connection between cultures and people. And that was one of the connections I was able to make,” he said.

UPCOMING EVENTS

School Vacation Workshop for Families 1 to 3 p.m. April 19, inspired by Paper Town and led by exhibiting artist Tory Fair.

Artist Talk with May Babcock 1 to 2 p.m. April 30, as part of Art in Bloom, see www.fitchburtartmuseum.org for special hours and prices.

Film and Panel Discussion: The Art of Social Activism 2 to 3:30 p.m. May 7, screening of the documentary Marion Stoddart: The Work of 1000 at 2 pm followed by a panel discussion with:∙Marion Stoddart, Activist, Founder, and first president of the Nashua River Watershed Association∙May Babcock, Artist whose work is in the FAM exhibition Paper Town∙Sue Edwards, Board member, Nashua River Watershed Association, Filmmaker∙Nick Capasso, Director, Fitchburg Art Museum

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Fitchburg Art Museum celebrates city's past with 'Paper Town' exhibit