Abaca Drawings

Perfection is overrated. Sometimes it is the flawed, the damaged, the hapless that gives a piece its soul. If I welcome mistakes they often bring good news; a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing. When it seems as if nothing is working out as I had expected I tell myself that, after all, it is only marks on a sheet of paper. Somehow this frees me up to see what my preconceived idea had disallowed.

Last year Gail Berkus and I had beaten some abaca fiber in her new Hollander. Overbeating abaca produces a translucent paper that catches the sunlight like melted wax and sounds like the crackle of autumn. We miscalculated and beat the fiber way too long. Instead of the usual 2-4 minutes, this porridge-like slurry took 20 minutes per sheet to drain! An unending El Nino rainstorm kept me from making paper in my improvised outdoor studio. If the pulp sat much longer it would simply spoil so I decided to just give in to the situation and make paper outdoors, in the rain. I made the weirdest, rain-spit paper I'd ever seen. It puckered and wrinkled as it dried, complete with the pentimento of a drizzly afternoon. Yet there is an uncanny beauty to it. Out of my control, I watched as something emerged out of mistake and mishap.

I used this abaca paper that I made by hand and let air dry, with allits irregularities and imperfections, to make this series of drawings based on Cycladic figures. The elemental intrusion onto the paper's surface of air and even raindrops became a counterpoint to the unwavering stance of the Cycladic form. For some, such as Delos, I burnished ochre pigment in to the leathery surfaces.

Mary Heebner 2000

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