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During my artist in residency at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology from Oct. 16, 2013 – January 10, 2014, one of the things I have been working on is a multi-part installation of suspended handmade paper sculptures inspired by the tall Sitka Spruce trees in the area.  We took a trip up into the national forest land nearby and saw a whole forest of the tall evergreen trees, and the atmosphere was very special.  We were told that these trees came back after a big fire in the 1960s that destroyed most of the trees.  It is a wonderful place, and I wanted to create an installation of many trees that would be made from the materials of the place.  The handmade paper is made from Sitka Spruce bark collected there and prepared at the Sitka Center studio where I am working now.  The bark from these trees is easy to collect from the ground around the trees because chunks of bark fall off from the birds or other animals or the tree just shedding.  I also found one tree nearby that had been trimmed and was able to collect some bark there.  The other pulp used for these trees is from the marsh or wetlands in the Salmon River Estuary that is nearby the Sitka Center.  The plant I used is the Sitka Sedge, and I collected some leaves from this sedge and prepared it into pulp.  When I cooked and beat this one to a pulp, I was so excited that it was a beautiful green color that looked just like the moss growing on the Sitka Spruce trees.  Even thought the pulp dries to a lighter tan color it is still a good contrast to the very dark rich brown of the Sitka Spruce pulp.  These photos were taken by Timothy S. Allen and one shows me making a tree in the Boyden Studio space at the Sitka Center, and the other photo shows a couple of them hanging in the space.  I plan to keep making more trees and make as many as I can during the residency and then find a place to install them for an exhibition.

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