The title of this piece is a question that I always get asked by someone whenever I speak about missing home, it represents the care and curiosity in that question, and the stories that follow. I created this piece for my Intro to Papermaking Midterm. After Dad taught me some hand papermaking over the summer, I fell in love with the idea of printing images on paper that I had made, and how paper made from different fibers held my photographs and revealed things about them that even I hadn’t noticed. Thus began the process to create my own photo paper. For this piece, I cooked and hand-beat Kozo fiber, then added sizing to allow the paper to be submerged in water for cyanotyping. I then lifted thick 8.5 x 11 inch Kozo fiber sheets and embedded unbeaten Kozo fiber and long, dry grasses in them (I wanted to have features of the lake landscape in the paper itself, interacting with the image). I then cyanotyped pictures I had taken at home over the summer, a picture my dad sent me of his ‘office’ by the lake and a picture of me as a baby, onto the Kozo sheets. Finally, I lifted thin 22 x 30 inch Kozo sheets and couched the cyanotyped paper onto them. Under 2 of the cyanotypes, I put abaca pulp paint, which shrinks as it dries, creating the sculptural coming-off-the-wall effect present in the pieces. Because of the thinness of the large sheets, when the piece is installed near wind or AC vents, it rustles, similar to how the trees would rustle in the lake breeze at home. The piece does sound like an afternoon by the lake. I chose cyanotyping because of how it obscures the image a little, like a memory. A medium soft enough to hold memory.
