INTRODUCTION
Typically, the artists featured in our pages have had substantial formal training, whether within the academy or outside of it, and often their creations can be seen in fine art galleries and museums. Here, we are devoting our portfolio to work produced by some inspired amateurs collaborating with a few full-time artists in a venture less concerned with aesthetics than with the cathartic power of making. That said, however, we find a remarkable degree of sophistication and subtlety in the works we have chosen to present.
The Combat Paper Project, founded in 2007 by book artist Drew Matott and soldier-turned-artist Drew Cameron, is a nonprofit organization that conducts workshops around the country teaching military veterans how to make paper by hand from their old uniforms (“combat paper”). The labor-intensive process—the uniforms are literally beaten to a pulp in water, flattened and dried on screens, and turned into a variety of paper art forms—is meant to give veterans a chance to tell their stories, to contend with and begin transforming their battlefield traumas.
“The story of the fiber, the blood, sweat, and tears, the months of hardship and brutal violence, are held within those old uniforms,” says Cameron, who served in the U.S. Army from 2000 to 2004 and then another two years in the Vermont National Guard. “Reshaping that association of subordination, of warfare and service, into something collective and beautiful is our inspiration.”
In 2004, Cameron had just returned from a nine-month stint as a field artillery soldier in Iraq when he took one of Matott’s papermaking workshops in Burlington, Vermont. (Matott has a BFA in printmaking from Buffalo State College and an MFA in book and paper arts from Columbia College in Chicago.) They bonded over a shared love of papermaking and eventually developed what would become the first CPP workshop, Matott says, from a handful of social, political, and aesthetic influences: the Warrior Writers Project writing and art workshops for veterans; book artist John Risseeuw’s series of handmade-paper prints incorporating landmine victims’ clothing; physician-artist Eric Avery’s works made from the clothing of South African HIV/AIDS orphans; and Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece,” a 1964 peace protest during which Ono invited audience members to cut off her clothing with scissors. In 2007, riffing on Ono’s performance art, Cameron cut his old uniform from his body (with a photographer on hand), made paper from it, and drove cross-country sharing that paper with his veteran friends—who responded by giving him their old uniforms. He began hosting informal papermaking workshops at Matott’s studio; soon after, Matott and Cameron took the workshop series on the road.
Phoenix (cover), one of a number of images that document Cameron’s ritual shedding of his soldier’s gear, combines the two processes most commonly used in the CPP workshops: pulp printing, in which finely beaten paper pulp is sprayed through a silk-screen onto a sheet of combat paper, with the pulp fibers intertwining as they dry so that the silk-screened image and the base paper merge; and pulp painting, in which different colored paper pulps are layered on the mold (the framed wire screen used in papermaking) to form the base sheet.
CPP has conducted such workshops at fine arts departments and veterans organizations around the country for the last four years, and its works have been exhibited at galleries, libraries, universities, and art centers around the country—including recently the Pepco Edison Place Gallery in Washington, DC, as part of the recent “Ten Years after 9/11” exhibit, and Harvard University’s Gutman Library. The project’s “Fabric of War” exhibit has toured the United Kingdom, and two images from its collection appeared in the Friends of Dard Hunter Juried Exhibit at the Ozu Washi-Oji Paper Museum in Tokyo in 2009. The project is now based in San Francisco, under Cameron’s direction.
M.W
