Plant fibre

For the past few years, Sujin Moon has been moving from place to place annually, finding unpaved soil and growing a garden each year in the unfamiliar locations she arrives in. Reflecting on how this gardening practice has persisted throughout her years of nomadic journeys and continued even in Maastricht, Moon describes gardening as a kind of counterbalance—a way to find a sense of equilibrium by grounding and rooting herself amid constant travel and wandering.

Moon considers gardening an exercise in close observation with the whole body: squatting low to the earth, observing how small things move, smelling, and working the soil. In these gestures, Moon finds echoes of her sculpting practice: touching surfaces to feel their textures, bearing the weight of objects as she moves them. While gardening, she has been collecting materials from the garden and creating works in response to what she discovers there. She experimented with making paper from different plant fibres she found.

The papers she produces become tangible objects, embodying her stay in a place by the time she is ready to leave. Experiences from the garden and time spent there are compressed into thin, light sheets of paper and carried with her as she moves on. Thus, the paper reflects her own journey of travelling through places, but it also encapsulates the material journey of the paper itself. Moon witnesses the entire process the paper goes through: from a seed sprouting and taking root, growing into a plant that blooms and bears fruit, then creating seeds identical to those it started from, to the plant withering, dying, becoming hay, and being boiled in water and ground into pulp, finally arriving as sheets of paper when it dries again. The stories that the plants collected while rooted in the earth are encapsulated in the silent sheets of paper, which also serve as empty spaces ready to absorb new stories. Moon sees a sheet of paper as a moment of finalising one journey and predicting the next, while still holding the stories within its body.
This work reflects on the notions of taking root and explores how this process involves learning through the body and finding language through haptic experience. It also examines the meanings of leaving and ending, and how memories of places shape the experience of time. Encompassing the meanings of arrival and departure, the work aims to capture the stories of beings who live within the dynamics of grounding and wandering, and their ways of being through the medium of paper, which serves as an empty space where stories arrive and new journeys begin.

Making process

1. Collect some hay
2. Boil it until you notice the fibre structure starts to break down and becomes loose and soft.
3. Grinding & Beating: Paper-making studios usually have machines called beaters for grinding and beating paper pulp. However, if you don’t have a beater, you can still use a kitchen blender, though it’s harder to get fine pulp with a kitchen blender. Hammering also works well for making pulp. Whatever method you use—whether with a blender, machine, or hammer—you can make the pulp by grinding it until you are satisfied with the delicacy of the fibre structure. Smaller particles of fibre will result in a finer paper surface.
4. Sifting the pulp from water: Once you have the pulp, put it in a bath with more water. You can use a tool that is a frame with mesh. Submerge the tool in the water bath and lift it out, keeping it in a horizontal position so that the pulp settles on the frame. You can easily find this tool in online markets, but you can also make it yourself. Attach some aluminium or fabric mesh to a frame and staple it tightly, much like framing a canvas.
5. Letting the pulp dry: Remove the pulp from the tool and place it on another surface. While you can use any surface, if the surface contains plant fibres, such as another paper or certain types of wood, it may be difficult to remove the dried paper later. Moon recommends using fabric made from animal fibres or synthetics like felt. If you want flat paper, you need to press it by placing some weight on top. Otherwise, the pulp will wrinkle and distort as it dries. The fibre structure pulls together, which actually makes the paper form a thin yet stable layer. However, if not pressed, the fibres pull randomly—some parts more, some parts less—resulting in distorted paper. You can also try drying the paper on the frame without removing it. Sometimes, the paper dries flat on the frame, but this depends on the type of plant the pulp comes from. Some pulps stay well on the frame as they dry, but others don’t.

* Note for Collecting Plants for Paper: Some plant fibres can be used to make paper, but others cannot. This raises the question of what qualifies as paper. Essentially, any type of fibre can go through the process described above and form a thin layer when dried. However, plants with shorter fibres often produce a brittle, cracker-like material that is not suitable for paper. Sujin Moon uses foldability and rollability as criteria for determining whether a material can be considered paper. However, it’s difficult to clearly define, as different plants have varying degrees of flexibility when folded or rolled. For instance, some papers made from specific plants can be folded but lack the resilience to withstand multiple folds. To test this, you can fold and roll some dried plant materials to get a sense of how they will perform as paper. If the material remains intact and flexible after being folded and rolled, without cracking or breaking, it may be suitable for paper-making.

Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.