For my May Term class I did Special Projects for Art which essentially means I got to make up a class and get 3 credits for doing whatever I wanted. I've been on a paper kick for a while now, and doing it with recycled paper always seemed important in terms of being able to be mindful of the sustainability factor that is involved with paper production. I did a presentation on handmade paper in my Senior Seminar class and then started thinking that it would be neat to do more with the topic. Once I started brainstorming the idea of lanterns as a visual display of what's possible with recycled paper came to mind, so I began the process of conceptualizing just how this could work.
In the end I decided that I would make handmade paper from recycled paper around campus and use the paper to make lanterns with the project ultimately culminating in an installation somewhere around campus so that people could see what I had been working on and what you can do with recycled paper. As I reflect on this now that it's over, making paper and lanterns might have been a bit of an ambitious task. I think just focusing on paper would have been a bit more practical, considering this is the first experience I really have working with handmade paper, but as it is things turned out alright. I struggled to figure out what the structures for the lanterns would be, experimenting with wire and wood from the sculpture lab, but found myself frustrated with the inorganic shapes I was coming up with. Eventually it hit me that working with sticks and branches and using the forms that they naturally created made much more sense with the feel of the entire project than anything else I was trying. So I began gathering sticks and branches, tying them together in cube and teepee-like shapes and then tried to figure out how the paper element would come into play.
I worked with various methods, sometimes molding the wet paper around the structures and sometimes working with dry paper, often sewing it to the frames. I ended up with about 12 lanterns, 3 fairly large (anywhere from 4 feet to 7 feet tall) and the rest smaller (about a foot each). The installation was held last night in a small courtyard that is sheltered in one of the buildings on campus. While it threatened to rain all night, and sprinkled and various times, it was a huge success, with the lanterns as well as other candles providing a perfect atmosphere for people to take a moment to just be together as we all pack up to leave.
After all of my traveling I realized that what usually takes all semester to design, I had to do in a week. So I haven't slept in 3 days and won't for 2 more but things are coming together. 
