Residency at the Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, Spain, a living museum of papermaking in Capellades, Spain. April - July 2012.

              

For more information and photos of the museum and antique mills of the surrounding region, please click here.

Please scroll down to see works produced during, or influenced by, the residency:

Let go (per teresa a roma), handmade cotton/pine paper allowed to drop to the floor while still wet and left to dry

Let go (per teresa a roma) installation view of Devotion/Destruction: Craft Inheritance, Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs.                                              Curated by Rebecca Pristoop. Photo by Anna Lise Jensen. 

              

A daily activity during the residency: fresh batch of handmade paper hung to dry in the top floor drying loft of the antique papermill.

              

My own handmade sheets of paper hung to dry, some are only hung by one corner and allowed to drop.

              

The dropped sheets left to dry on the terra cotta floor.

              

Let go (per teresa a roma), detail and installation view at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Projects. Photos bottom row: Anna Lise Jensen



     "...The word "crumpled" usually elicits an image of a discarded piece of paper. But "crumpled" can be used to describe more than just paper (as in [Cheryl Ann] Thomas's work), and paper is more than just a surface for unsuccessful poems and sketches. As Alyssa Casey reminds us, paper begins life as a pulp - an aqueous mixture of macerated plant fibers. This soggy matter has the potential to be sculpted, cast, turned into sheets of paper, or even left to find its own shape. For Let go (per teresa a roma), (2012), Casey used a cotton/pine pulp to mold flat sheets of paper. She then hung these wet rectangular panels from a drying line on the top floor of a paper mill in Spain, leaving one edge of each sheet unpinned. With open windows, and the pull of gravity, the damp sheets fell to the floor, finding their shape in relation to the rush of wind, the irregularity of ground, and the degree of dryness upon impact. The organic folds and crinkles in each of the five objects in the series speak to the when, where, and how of their genesis, visualizing their formation and engaging the viewer's somatic experience.

     Moving beyond the functional, each work in this exhibition takes shape as an abstract investigation into craft practices. Through prolonged relationships with material and process, the artists in Devotion/Destruction: Craft Inheritance make visible the physicality of de/construction and the visceral effects of their actions. Through their work, they also carve a space for the re/consideration of the socio-historical constructs of traditional craft production."

      - Rebecca Pristoop, excerpt from her curatorial essay accompanying the exhibition, Devotion/Destruction: Craft Inheritance at Dorsky               Gallery Curatorial Programs

     "...Alyssa Casey’s works are luminous paper structures, masquerading as fabric forms hanging on the wall and placed on the floor. Friendly, luminous and winsome they beg to touch even though forbidden. The viewer sees a soft object and is once again fooled by the materials. Comfort may be found in discovering the paper is made with cotton and pine wherein your senses again become engaged in a deception that pleases with the fresh and familiar..."

      - Jeannine Bardo, from "Devotion/Desctruction", review of Devotion/Destruction: Craft Inheritance at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs

Records del Molí: exúvia, balcó decadent, and maça in pietà, handmade paper casts of the architecture of the papermill:

Paper casting to make exúvia (left) and balcó decadent (right)