Not Quite Full Circle…

The papyrus plant has such a fascinating history — it was once broken down and transformed into paper, a material that has carried human stories, poetry, and history for thousands of years. One only needs to visit a museum with an Egyptian collection to see yellowing sheets featuring strips of sliced, soaked, and pressed papyrus pith covered in beautiful hieroglyphs. We still use deconstructed plant material to make paper today, but nothing as iconic and reminiscent of its origin as the papyrus sheet.

Having just bought two of these plants, which greet me every time I pass through the front door, I wanted to acknowledge their timelessness and elegance. For this piece, I took used and dyed Color Catchers, which are themselves made from paper, to recreate three stems of papyrus. I found poetry in using paper to bring the plant back to life: papyrus becomes paper, and then paper tries to become papyrus again.

The process became a reflection on deconstruction and the way we interact with nature. We take things apart, transform them, and try to recreate what was there before. However, no matter how carefully we imitate the natural world, the original is irreplaceable.

This is about the memory of the plant held within the paper, and the reminder that nature is always more complex and beautiful than our attempts to recreate it.

(For the record, I intentionally tried to quilt over the rectangles so that the second pass didn’t lie directly over the first stitching line. It was remarkably challenging to make it look a little scribbly!)

Title: Not Quite Full Circle

Materials: Color Catchers, batiks, fusible web

Size: 20.25″ x 41.5″