Mary Simpson Wrap Me in Glory
etching on paper (detail), 47" x 31" , 2005
The use of paper in art and design often connotes the making of drafts, plans, maquettes, initial sketches, studies and other steps toward a future enactment or composition—minor incursions into a field of greater possibility. With this understanding, something is meant to be caught, marked, and noted ‘on paper’ to be eventually returned to and elaborated upon in a final form. Renaissance draftsmen and printmakers referred to such efforts as primi pensieri or “first thoughts”, placing a primary but—in the same breath—cursory importance upon using this most basic material.
Even as the notion of thinking on paper (something increasingly foregone in today’s wireless world) is still familiar to all of us, it has become more and more fleeting and ancillary. And yet this ‘catch and release’ relegating of paper in favor of more engineered means finds its aesthetic inverse in the work of many contemporary artists for whom paperworks are integral.
Such diverse artists as Marcel Dzama (and his cohort The Royal Art Lodge), Rosemarie Trockel, and Jockum Nordström have taken offhand approaches to works on paper and built expansive, incisive, and highly personal bodies of work that approach near-realms of making. Architectural and sculptural constructions from artists like Victoria Haven and Tara Donovan further embody a reinvigoration of what form paper can take as a medium. And recent work by William Kentridge and venerable master Louise Bourgeois reminds of the exacting, detailed precision only printmaking can sustain and bring to life. But the question will remain ongoing and recurrent—can such a first technology as paper, with its direct, expectant nature be renewed time and again as an enchanted and far-reaching medium?