Papermakers of Queensland
Paper seems to me to be a material that links us as individuals and collectively as a culture in an all embracing way, and yet it remains largely unnoticed, unseen and invisible as matter—in our society it is the ultimate medium or vehicle, a means to an end. Even with the massive growth in screen delivered communication, it is hard to imagine a world without paper. In a recent ABC "Arts Today" program, a group of artists were asked to imagine just this—a world without paper. They said they "could not do so": it played too fundamental a role in the way they even began to think, let alone organised and expressed themselves. They would "simply make it" they said, "if it didn't exist"! Our culture is inseparably linked to paper: it is recorder and marker, it formalises, finalises, and declares proof. It is the way much of our cultural information and knowledge is circulated (literature, religion, history, law, art) and it is vehicle for many of our cultural processes: documents, letters, manuscripts, newspapers, magazines, books, maps, drawings, tickets, dockets, packaging (imagine life without egg cartons), wrapping paper.
At the Queensland Museum, the recently established Papermakers of Queensland organised a juried exhibition of their members work as well as a display of the science of paper production. The display and exhibition, coordinated by Heather Lesley and Jan Haughton, aimed primarily to focus attention on the processes, intricacies and pleasures of hand made paper. The tools of paper production consisting of domestic appliances like a blender, plastic buckets, large saucepans, sieves, stirrers created a democratic starting point to the exhibition. Then there were fibre specimens, many recognizable from one's own