Water Books, a Concert in F(lax) for Fourdrinier and Artist
Susan Warner Keene at Papeterie Saint-Armand
Published in Book Arts arts du livre Canada / Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild
Article by Don Taylor
It’s probably a coincidence. In 1979 David Carruthers started making handmade paper at Papeterie Saint-Armand, his mill in Montreal, and became an important Canadian supplier of fine art papers. In the same year Susan Warner Keene graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and became an important Canadian fibre artist working primarily in handmade papers. However, it took until 2012 for these two cultural forces to come together in Susan’s latest project, Water Books. This work was possible at Saint-Armand because of the resident Fourdrinier papermaking machine.
Papeterie Saint-Armand, sitting like a throwback from the Industrial Age in a large wet warehouse on the edge of the Lachine Canal in Montreal, is the creation of David Carruthers, a man with deep roots in Canada’s papermaking history. His grandfather owned a paper mill in Ontario and David’s father
sold the paper that Grandpa Carruthers made.
So when, in 1979, fed up with his office job at The Pulp and Paper Association of Canada, David set up shop on his own, he was able to translate his knowledge of the industry and his love of nineteenth-century technology into an artisanal business making fine handmade paper for artists, stationers,
packagers and bookbinders.
The “dry” end of the Fourdrinier where the cutter trims the paper roll.
Anthony Vieira and David Carruthers
While continuing to produce handmade paper in pre-Industrial Revolution fashion, i.e., sheet by sheet by a human with a mould and deckle, Saint- Armand, as they are known in Toronto at least, upped their game substantially in 1992 by acquiring a 1000 lb. Hollander beater which was put to use feeding the considerable productive power of their other new purchase, a Fourdrinier.
This remarkable machine with its 100 feet of paperforming web, suction table and heated rollers, can form and dry a continuous 22-foot-wide roll of paper until the end of time, or for as long as you feed it with the “mechanical” pulp, i.e., no chemicals, produced by the Hollander. The Hollander beater processes a combination of water and cotton, or linen offcuts from the garment industry, into paper pulp. It can also use other cellulose-bearing fibres such as flax, jute and sisal, and it was the combination of the capabilities of the beater and Fourdrinier in play with flax fibre that attracted Keene’s attention.
As she described it, the “hypnotic” process of the Fourdrinier; pulp and water agitated together, the continuous wet leaf pressed through felted rollers and then gradually dried out by suction and more heated rollers all at the continuous rate of 12 feet per minute, had her wondering how she could interact with this device. She was intrigued to see her familiar sheet-forming practice reinterpreted in this way and proposed a project which would see her interacting with the machine to produce a body of paper that she could put to use in a future project .
Carruthers, who enjoys this kind of artistic intervention at the Papeterie, was, as Keene reports, “enthusiastic” and she returned twice more to plan and then execute her project.
Keene started out interested in weaving and tapestry but for the last 20 years the processes and materials of hand papermaking have occupied her creative life. She has observed that while we have for many years used paper as a medium to record experience, ideas and observations, the paper itself “can embody experience, as we do ourselves.
Dark Rebus #2 from Revisions, 2007. Text: Round, as yet round, my dreams keep revolving. —Bashö, 1694. Handmade paper (abaca fibre), thread, pigment. 46 cm diameter.
Silence, 2011. Handmade paper (abaca fibre, cotton rag), 61 x 609 x 2.5 cm.
Cursive #3 from Water Line, 2020. Handmade flax paper, linen thread, pigment. 48 x 50 x 3 cm.
It can assume the qualities of cloth and skin, evoking the body and its knowledge.” She has primarily used flax fibre because of its unique potentials, unlocked in the processes of pulp preparation and sheet forming. The nature of flax fibre pulp can give the sheet a translucent skin-like quality as well as distinctive features of stretch while wet and of texture as it shrinks during drying.
In 2011, her show, Silence, commented on the idea of the sequential nature of the book form as a physical object and the “imaginative space” of the page. The dramatic textures in this series of 11 handmade sheets came out of Keene’s experiments with the preparation of her flax.
Earlier shows such as Water Line commented on the “fluid medium of papermaking to observe the power of water to form and imprint our world.”
In ReVisions from 2007, works such as Rebus and Painted Book used text rendered in high shrinkage pulp to achieve a kind of 3D calligraphy.
More recently, in her 2012 show, Foliate, Keene reflected on the sheet of paper as an end in itself rather than a vehicle for information. In these works the
“empty” page carries its own message.
Keene using a section of plastic eavestrough to interrupt the flow from the water jets. PHOTO | ANTHONY VIEIRA
For Water Books, she realized that the Fourdrinier was superbly capable of, in effect, making that earliest of book forms, the scroll, and for that matter, one of infinite length, as long as you avoided the trimmer that cuts the paper into sheets at the dry end.
Preparations for the big event included installing a series of water jets arranged across the width of the paper-forming web at the so-called “wet end.” These would watermark the paper along its length in way suggestive of musical staves or lines of text. (I would add that with an awareness of the skin-like properties of flax paper, these marks also suggest ritual scarification). Flax was the pulp of choice, as it often is with Keene, because of its strength. Also tests with the water jets worked well with the flax. Other tests established the desirable pressure for the water and the speed of the paper-forming web.
It was also necessary to be able to interrupt the water jets without stopping the papermaking process. To this end, a simple piece of eavestroughing was adopted as a way to allow Keene to catch the water from the jets and stop the watermarking for a few seconds at a time according to a preset timetable. This became her opportunity to influence the Fourdrinier’s otherwise uniform production as the paper rolled by and introduce a little of what David Pye in The Nature and Art of Workmanship calls “workmanship of risk.” Yes, you can make a mess but equally the possibility is there to do something original and unique. This is the moment where the artist can collaborate with the machine. The timetable became the “score” with which she conducted the piece.
PHOTO | SUSAN WARNER KEENE
Let us now return to Papeterie Saint-Armand in November 2012, where something “hypnotic” is happening. Weeks of preparation and tests are about to come to fruition. A quantity of flax pulp has been made ready. Above the water jets Keene has pinned her score, a piece of paper with her hand-written time indications for “water on” or “water off.” Now she stands ready with her piece of gutter like a baton in hand. Please take your seats. This performance will last slightly less than an hour.
The Fourdrinier starts its work. The noise is deafening. Pulp becomes wet leaf, and then, as the web vibrates and the water is suctioned out of the pulp and the heated rollers press and dry the “scroll,” hundreds of feet of flax paper, watermarked according to the score, are rolled up by the end of the hour. Suddenly the performance is at an end.
What now? Water Books is really just beginning the process of coming into being. Susan has removed her, by my calculation, 700 feet of paper to her studio in Toronto. Plans have yet to crystallize but to be sure the outcome of this exercise will result in a body of work in the Keene mode – intelligent, thoughtful and powerfully felt by the viewer both intellectually and on the surface of the skin.
Susan Warner Keene would like to thank David Carruthers and Denise Lapointe, directors of Papeterie Saint-Armand, for their expertise and enthusiasm for the project, and staff members Joanne Murray and Anthony Vieira for invaluable assistance. She is also grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for supporting this endeavour.
Water Line #3 from Water Line, 2009. Handmade flax paper, pigment. 35.5 x 24 x 1.27 cm
Leaf #9 from Foliate, 2012. Handmade paper (abaca fibre, cotton rag, linen thread). 54.6 x 44.5 x 3.8 cm.
Leaf #4 from Foliate, 2012. Handmade paper (abaca fibre, cotton rag). 58.4 x 45.7 x 3.18 cm.