New Work 2020 (part 1)

This year I have continued my work with seaweed paper. I have added to my series of large ‘floating dress’ images, and in recent months I have also extended this work to 3D!

This all started several years ago with people’s comments about my 2D dresses such as ‘so do you think you could make one of these dresses that you could actually wear?’, and me thinking well I wonder if I could. Then this year, with the Covid restrictions and things going a bit quiet in the art world, it seemed like a good time to play around and experiment with something a bit different.

Now seaweed paper isn’t like conventional paper. Different seaweeds make different kinds of paper, but a lot of it is quite fragile, some of it is very brittle when dry, and it very often doesn’t do what you want it to. I wasn’t sure whether it would be possible to make a 3D dress, or how to go about it. So I started experimenting.

My seaweed papermaking journey has all been experimental. I am used to trying lots of things, and having lots of less than successful outcomes, so I was prepared for this work to take time. My plan was to start by making some small doll-sized prototype dresses, about 30cm, to try out various designs and construction methods. I was concerned that the paper might crack or tear, especially the more fragile ones, and I wasn’t sure how the different seaweed papers would behave when sculpted as I hadn’t used them much in this way before.

For my first prototype small dress I designed a fairly simple style, and cut out the pieces as I would for dressmaking. I used an iron-on polyester interfacing, which I attached to the dried paper pieces before assembly, to give some structural integrity.

I found that the interfacing did not completely prevent the paper from tearing, but it did make it easier to repair! However it made it a bit thick and heavy, the paper lost some of its translucency, and I didn’t like the look of it.

For my second prototype I made the paper pieces for the dress with a silk backing.

This also worked to some extent in making the paper stronger, and I thought it looked slightly better than the interfacing, but I still wasn’t happy with the appearance.

I much preferred the idea of making a dress solely from seaweed paper, so for my next prototype I chose my most robust pulps and made a dress without any backing or lining. I was pleased with this result.

I wanted these dresses to look as if they were underwater, floating and weightless, so I needed to find a way to stiffen the paper. This also entailed trialling different techniques and products.

Overall, although these dresses were not perfect by any means, and very fiddly to make, I was pleasantly surprised with the results!