Artist Makes The Pulp Novel

The surface of Jennifer Davies’s Blue Accord, part of ​“In Mind and Hand” — a show of Davies’s work up now at City Gallery on State Street through May 29 — is a panoply of textures, and not just visual ones. There are the endless variations on indigo, wrought by applying the dye in unpredictable ways. But look closer, and you can tell the material itself has a tactile life of its own, sometimes punctuated by string. Davies may be a visual artist by training, but her art appeals to more than one of the senses.

“It’s all paper,” Davies said of Blue Accord — and, by extension, most of the pieces in the exhibit — ​“and most of it is Japanese paper, a kind called kozo, and one reason I use it is that I can process it at home.” Another way to put it is that she has a chance to get her hands dirty.

Kozo is a mulberry that can be dried until it resembles ​“cornstalks,” Davies said. It can be ordered online from papermaking sources. When Davies gets a shipment, first she cooks it (“it does not smell good,” she said), then beats it with a mallet into a pulp, ​“until it’s soft, almost like dough. Then I put it into a bin along with some magic goo, which allows paper to be very, very thin. And then I make sheets out of it.” She does this by dipping a screen into the pulp; the water drains away and the fibers are left to dry into a sheet.

Kozo often is made, into fine, uniform, gauzy sheets of paper. ​“You can have control if you care about it,” Davies said. But that’s not what draws her to the material as an artist. ​“I like some things to get all scrunched up,” she said. ​“You let things air dry; if you take it off the screen before it’s dry, it contracts.”

What does she like about ceding some control to the material? ​“Everything,” she said. ​“I don’t want to do this alone.” The paper is ​“absolutely my partner. I could never think of the things I do if things didn’t happen” — if the paper didn’t change as she worked with it.

She begins pieces with a ​“pretty concrete idea of what I want,” but then finds herself in dialogue with the pieces as she begins developing them. ​“There’s a call and response thing that’s happening all the time,” she said. ​“Literally, of course, it all originates in your brain, but there’s a lot of unconscious stuff that your hand does,” akin to musical improvisation. ​“At some point you just have to trust.”

She created some of the textures in Blue Accord with indigo dye and masking tape. ​“If you interfere with the contact of the indigo dye with the paper, you have some funny stuff going on,” she said. She applies the dye with no sure sense of how that interference will manifest itself, and works with the dried results.

With other pieces she creates contrasts by applying white paper pulp to sheets of black paper, by pouring it on, by using a turkey baster, or by spattering it on. ​“You work layer by layer, building it up,” she said. ​“I’ve always been interested in waves, the succession as they go over, the transparency.” So she uses river rocks as stencils, pouring thin pulp all around, adding as she goes.

“It’s very liberating,” she said. ​“And if you can’t stand what you did, you just add a layer of pulp. You can’t take away what you did, but you can cover it up.”

For some pieces, Davies reaches beyond the paper to incorporate other shapes, and other textures, she finds in the world. She has also made prints of the tar marks in a parking lot, which crews make to patch cracks in the pavement; they’re like ​“accidental drawings,” she said (see Haywire above). ​“I’m always looking for parking lots because they eventually ruin them by putting new asphalt over them. It’s so tragic for me,” she said with another laugh. She builds further texture by sewing string into the pieces.

In addition, Davies’s husband is ​“always scouting for me” for interesting materials Davies can use. One day he was running and a branch crashed to the ground near him. ​“It ripped the bark off the branch completely cleanly,” she said. Under the bark ​“it was like yellow silk.” The couple hauled the branch home in the car, and last summer, she began to make prints from it, applied directly to the paper. In other cases, she has used the pulp to make a cast of the bark itself.

If she’s dissatisfied with a piece but doesn’t know quite how to proceed, she may put it away for a while, then take it out again. ​“With fresh eyes,” she said, ​“sometimes you immediately see why it’s not working, or what to add.” She sometimes makes new pieces from the scraps she cuts off of other pieces, using leftover pigments. ​“It’s a kind of play, just playing with different elements,” she said. She looks for the materials to feel integrated, to feel organic.

“You just keep pushing,” she said. ​“I really like the material to be quite prominent, so you know it’s real, a real physical thing. It’s not an illusion.”

Why appeal to the senses of both sight and touch? ​“You can see people want to touch this all the time, because your fingers are another way of knowing, and it is so tactile,” Davies said. ​“There’s something intrinsically exciting to me about textiles, physical things.” She thinks many respond to her art in the same way. ​“People don’t need to touch paintings. But you want to touch textiles.”

Touch, she added, ​“is a big sense. Just think about if you’re near a big, fluffy dog. Just try and keep your hands off that. It’s a way of connecting.”

“In Mind and Hand” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through May 29. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.