SUMMER POUR 1: Milfoil, Maine, sits eagerly at the intersection of craft, environmental art, and socially engaged art. New research led by two artists, Milcah Bassel and Patricia Brace, collided in the summer of 2023 to bring forth the resulting body of work.
Milcah Bassel’s 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 Bassel’s multidisciplinary practice, where she integrates 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.
Patricia Brace began working with milfoil in 2020, 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.
SP1_milfoil maine 1, 2023
36 x 28”
handmade paper (50/50 milfoil/abaca fibers, formation aid, board dried)
SP1_milfoil maine 2, 2023
36 x 28”
handmade paper (90/10 abaca/ milfoil fiber, milfoil stripes added during sheet formation prior to drainage, board dried)
SP1_milfoil maine 3, 2023
36 x 27.5”
handmade paper (abaca/milfoil fiber gradients formed during drainage, formation aid, board dried)
SP1_milfoil maine 4, 2023
36 x 28”
handmade paper (milfoil sheet backed by abaca sheet using methyl cellulose, board dried)
SP1_milfoil maine 5, 2023
36 x 28”
handmade paper (abaca couched directly onto milfoil sheet, board dried)
SP1_milfoil maine 6, 2023
36 x 28”
handmade paper (abaca couched directly onto milfoil sheet with cooked but not beaten milfoil inclusions, board dried)
SP1_milfoil maine 7, 2023
34 x 25 x 6”
handmade paper (pulp painting of five milfoil/abaca fiber gradients with pellon used for masking, formation aid, abaca base sheet, air dried)
SP1_milfoil maine 8 (disc), 2023
10 x 9 x 3”
handmade paper (freeform cast 95/5 milfoil/abaca fiber, formation aid, air dried)
Women and Water
Women and Water
Lake Arrowhead, Maine
2023
Patricia Brace
Filmed by Stephen Underwood
Assisted by Debbie Broderick
Filmed floating above Variable Leaf Milfoil, an invasive aquatic plant in Lake Arrowhead, Maine, “Women and Water” is a somatic performance addressing human's role in the current climate crisis.
In "Women and Water," a figure drifts atop the dense plants, unknowing of the omnipresent green mass underneath. Occasionally a tendril of the invasive drapes over an arm, or loops onto a foot, but the body slips, unbothered by the plant's touch.
The aerial view of the drone emphasizes the otherworldliness of the botanical species, while the artist's corporeal presence is paired with a track from Mitski's album “This Land is Inhospitable and so are We”.
Playing metaphorically with the romantic narrative arc of the music “Women and Water” asks, how do we cohabitate with nature during a time of climate crisis when, like the milfoil, it is impossible to eradicate, but can be improved through collaborative efforts.