Susan Warner Keene
Foliate: new work in handmade paper
March 1 – 25, 2012
My work in handmade paper concentrates on the membrane of the page as an expressive form in its own right, not simply as a support. To me, a sheet of paper represents a unique conjunction of the human capacities for making and for communicating. The objects I make are the result of thinking through the implications of this dialogue between material and experience.
Today, printed text is offered to us in many forms, increasingly electronic, and this is generally efficient, timely and cheap. I am intrigued, however, by the paradoxical “charge†possessed by the sheet of paper, even empty of text. It is, after all, a format in which we have registered thoughts and histories for hundreds of years, a rectangle of plant fibres that we sense with our bodies and whose imaginative space invites our entry. A sheet of paper can challenge us to be fully present.
My thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts for assistance with a project in 2010 that contributed to the works in this exhibition.
