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The tedious craft of turning
tree bark into treasure
I make the paper out of kozo or mitsumata bark from Japan. I buy the dried
white inner bark of the tree.
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The bark is soaked
overnight, rinsed, and then cooked for several hours in a soda ash
solution to break it down enough to work with. After cooking it is
rinsed again.
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At this point the fiber is
ready for cleaning. All the tiny pieces of outer bark that remain are
removed by (my) hand. It takes hours. (Japanese rice paper is not made
from rice; rather, this grade of paper still has unclean fibers in it
and is thus only suitable for the lowly task of packaging rice.)
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Now the fiber is ready for
beating (as in, “beaten to a pulp”). Japanese fibers yield the best
results when hand beaten with sticks. Again, it takes hours. But the
fibers are lengthened and stretched, retaining their inherent strength.
Traditional Western beating cuts and mashes the fibers using a machine.
These cut, shorter fibers are not as strong.
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I dye the fiber at this
point, having found the dyes to take evenly and disperse better in
beaten fiber (it makes sense). I use cold-water dyes that are
color-fast.
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Before pouring, the pulp is
mixed with a root compound, tororo-aio. Tororo-aio helps the paper sheet
form, slows drainage, and also binds the individual fibers of the pulp
together. This allows thin, strong, multi-layered pours of color to
produce a thin, strong paper.
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The pulp is poured into a
wood frame lined with layers of wire screening. It is poured
simultaneously into all the sections of the wood frame. The sections are
large metal guides for the pulp, like giant cookie cutters. The
tororo-aio slows down drainage long enough to give me a few seconds to
manipulate the pulp while it is in the frame.
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Metal shapes are removed and
the sheet is left to dry in the sun. It is later peeled off the screen.
I use colored pencils and sometimes gold leaf to enhance or alter the
composition.
As you see, it’s labor
intensive. The Japanese say that you take something worthless (bark), invest
a thousand hours of backbreaking work, and finally have something of
marginal worth that will still vanish in a puff of smoke. It’s a metaphor.
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