The artist Jackson Martin currently has a show up at the Greenbelt Art Gallery (15 Crescent Rd. Greenbelt, MD 20770) through March 15, highlighting his recent wall mounted relief sculptures, photographs and a ‘plant installation’, as he calls it. Anyone who is anywhere around Washington D.C. should find the time to go see the show.

I came across Jackson’s work in the March 2008 issue of the magazine Sculpture and found the blurb compelling enough to do a Google search. Lo and behold, many of the pieces in his project relate uncannily to those of my own. Check Jackson’s work out at his website: www.jacksonmartin.com

Sculpture says of Jackson that he, “explores a collaborative détente between nature and culture that acknowledges the human urge to control and order while accepting the unpredictable and constantly changing world around us.” He juxtaposes the industrial pristine: plastic, steel, wood, glass, plastic with the organic: plants, dirt, water, light.

Many of Jackson’s pieces literally contain plant growth, in the form of grass, house plants, trees, and these plants realize their own logic of structure through their natural growth, a logic that is at times in conflict with our human structuring, and yet in Jackson’s work it is a tamed and domesticated growth.

I recently began working on a series of small collages, each roughly 11″x9″, made from commercial paper, pen, ink, gouache, acrylic paint, and handmade paper that I have made at the Brodsky Center for Innovate Editions’ papermaking studio, which is also open to students in Rutgers’ Mason Gross visual arts program.

The handmade paper on these collages includes my MODTURF™ paper embedded with grass seed, abaca paper, sisal paper, and cotton rag. The images, some of which are shown below, each present a vision of the landscape.

The small collages are very physical and intimate, but are really preliminary studies for larger pieces, which I anticipate will measure 8′x6′ and will perhaps have a third dimension as a sculptural object.

So this weekend I spent some time in the Brodsky Center’s papermaking studio with a few other generous assistants to form 3 sheets of grass seed embedded paper, each measuring 8′x4′ and containing over 3 lbs. of paper pulp! These sheets are huge by my standards, and were a great time in the making.

The process involved forming a thick cotton rag sheet of paper (2 lbs. of cotton) in an 8′x4′ vacuum table, distributing seed onto this sheet, and forming a sheet of abaca (which is a much stronger and more transparent fiber) over the seeds and cotton.

Once the composite sheet drained, a vacuum was attached to the table to remove even more water, and finally the sheet was removed from the table, pressed under 20,000 lbs. of pressure in a large Dake press, and placed in a drying system with several box fans to dry for a week.

I intend to collage these full sheets, or close to the full sheet, directly onto the larger collage pieces, and juxtapose the handmade paper with other collaged materials such as tar paper and digitally printed vinyl banners. I will post images of these pieces as they develop.

I am posting a few photos of the papermaking process here for anyone who has not seen the process of forming a very large sheet of paper.

Vacuum table full of water, ready for cotton pulp

I am distributing grass seed on the cotton paper

Surface of the paper before it is pressed

2lb. paper pulp beater full of cotton rag