SUMMER POUR, 2023-

A Friendship-Based Papermaking Project

Co-created annually with a rotating constellation of people, plants, and places

SUMMER POUR is a friendship-based papermaking project, co-created annually with a rotating constellation of people, plants, and places. Set to discover new symbiotic relationships in each iteration, the project centers the intimate, the qualitative, the curious, and the handmade. In papermaking we find a nexus for learning from and about a plant through the craft of transforming its fiber, while also using its laboriousness as impetus for spending time with community in the act of making. The project extends from my multidisciplinary practice, where I integrate material and non-material approaches for activating bodies in the private, public, and spiritual realms. Increasingly, these activations are experimental antidotes to the abundant crises of our time. An epidemic of loneliness is said by some to extend beyond our need for meaningful person-to-person contact and across an almost unspoken yearning for intimacy with other forms of life. We have an inherent longing for “nature” which we have rather thoroughly severed from “ourselves”. This project is an invitation to find collaborators in the plants, places, and people that surround us. It is in this spirit that Summer Pour hopes to be re-envisioned and re-discovered each year.

SUMMER POUR 1: Milfoil, Maine, July 2023

People: Milcah Bassel and Patricia Brace

with William O Valdes, Ziv Steinberg, and Grace Brace.

Plants: Milfoil, Abaca.

Places: Lake Arrowhead and Patricia’s backyard/home in North Waterboro, ME; SMFA Paper Studio in Boston, MA; and many a zoom meeting.

Products: Eight pieces of handmade paper with variable ratios of milfoil and abaca fibers, formation aid (PEO), and methyl cellulose, were made during one daylong session. Seven of the pieces were formed in a large pour mould, some in multiple layers, while one piece was cast freeform. All the paper was air dried, some of the sheets were restrained against wood boards. Dimensions vary from 36 x 28” to 10 x 9 x 3”.

Dedication: This project is in loving memory of Stacey Leigh Kemp who believed that with confidence, you could do anything.   

SUMMER POUR 1: Milfoil, Maine, sits eagerly at the intersection of craft, environmental art, and socially engaged art. What follows is a narrative description of the inaugural Pour, extending from the project statement above and colliding with a mysterious fiber called Milfoil brought forth by performance artist Patricia Brace.

Patricia Brace began working with milfoil in 2019, soon after moving to Lake Arrowhead, Maine. She was motivated to do something about the invasive aquatic plant taking over the lake, while also in search of a local community.  After learning of PALZ, Brace joined the conservation group surveying Lake Arrowhead for invasive species. Brace’s work with PALZ has become a new branch of her somatic and community-based practice. Overall, Brace’s work is concerned with the body as it relates to place and crisis. Viewing performance art as the most sustainable visual art medium, Brace’s art examines how we cohabitate with nature during a rapidly unfolding climate situation. As an invasive species in a small Maine lake, the milfoil is a harbinger of the impact the changing climate has on our lives as it chokes the oxygen out of the lake. Like performance art, creating paper from milfoil is another way to grapple with place and crisis in a physical and tangible way.

Bassel and Brace, who have collaborated on several projects over the last decade, decided to merge explorations and began researching the possibility of making paper out of milfoil. Brace collected and sundried copious amounts of milfoil from Lake Arrowhead in spring 2023. The dried plants were processed into a pulp with the help of Will O Valdes, Bassel’s student and MFA candidate at SMFA-Tufts University. The fibers were cooked briefly in soda ash and macerated in the Reina beater. To provide supplemental strength for the milfoil, abaca fibers were also prepared (a reliable papermaker’s fiber from the inedible banana plant grown in the Philippines). A special birthday weekend at the end of July was scheduled for the big Pour at the home of Brace and her husband Chris Hayden in Lake Arrowhead. Bassel and Brace were joined that day by Grace Brace and Ziv Steinberg who helped with all the joy and tedium of making large paper outdoors, documenting the process, and cleaning up, interrupted only by a midday swim in the lake. The milfoil and abaca pulp were formed into large sheets of paper using a 28 x 36” handcrafted papermaking mould and a combination of specialized and ad hoc equipment. A total of eight unique pieces resulted before the sun dropped away, each piece revealing new qualities of the milfoil by playing with ratios, texture, gradients, and layering. One of the most exciting discoveries was the rich black color of the fiber, something usually achieved only by adding black pigment to plant-based pulps. The paper was left to air dry and cockle or dried against wooden boards for restraint. The resulting pieces are best experienced in person to fully appreciate not only their visual but also tactile richness. In a series of performative documentation photos one can also appreciate the relationship between hands, labor, and the resulting artwork – as each piece is held in turn for the camera.

Part 2 of SUMMER POUR 1: Milfoil, Maine, is scheduled for February 2024. Brace will visit Bassel’s Int/Adv Papermaking students at SMFA-Tufts University to collaborate on a new series of milfoil paper pieces. More info on this soon…