Connecting + Transforming with Street Pulp

UPDATE :: EXHIBITION, ENCORE + RECEPTION

We are excited to celebrate the culmination of a true creative placemaking collaboration with artist Kris Westerson! STREET PULP was an idea Kris brought to Enough Pie in early 2014 and we were honored to help fund her project and collaborate with her for 2 public events during the fall of last year.

Saturday April 11th at the Charleston Farmers Market we will be making paper and building community once again with Kris! Come join us from 8am-2pm. After the Farmers Market, stroll down to the Charleston Public Library at 68 Calhoun Street and learn more about the Street Pulp project and see the final Artists’ Books. “Making Community: Street Pulp Artists’ Books” is on exhibit in the Saul Alexander Gallery until April 29th. Kris will be on hand in Conference Room B from 3-5pm to answer questions and share stories about the project. She’ll also be serving pie and other refreshments. You know we like pie!!

“The project and exhibition explore the idea of creative placemaking in the upper peninsula. The transformative process from fiber to pulp to paper and then to the object of artists’ book is an apt analogy for creative placemaking. Fiber does not change its nature, only its form, just as creative placemaking will change the form, but not the nature of the upper peninsula.

The three artists’ books in the exhibition are comprised of the handmade sheets pulled by the participants during the Street Pulp events. I selected the accordion book structure for the books that include individual sheets made by makers and the artist. I chose this book structure because it evokes the connectivity of community. Similar to each member of the community, each sheet is individual and connected to another in a variety of ways – in the book and in the flesh.”

Read more on Kris’s blog.

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Enough Pie is excited to announce a creative collaboration with artist Kris Westerson. Kris, assisted by volunteers from the community, will present four individual Street Pulp events, each at a different location in the Upper Peninsula. Working outside in parking lots and playgrounds, community members of all ages will make and decorate paper from pulp containing recycled clothing and paper collected from the community before the event. Once sheets of paper are dry, the artist will create a very long accordion book. The book will then be given back to the community and will be on view, traveling to different locations around the Upper Peninsula. The book serves as a tangible reminder of learning, creativity, collaboration and transformation.

Please join Enough Pie and artist Kris Westerson at these two public events:

Dart Library, 1067 King Street, Saturday September 27, 2014. 10:30am until 2:30pm

DwellSmart, 804 Meeting Street, Saturday October 11, 2014. 10:00am until 2:00pm.

“Shortly after I moved to Charleston, I began following Enough Pie on Facebook, signed up for their newsletter, and put them on my “want to get to know you list.” The organization had just started and hosted the first Awakening shortly before I arrived; it was so exciting to be moving to a community that cared about creative placemaking and actually used the word. My interest in place began in the mid to late 1990s when I read “Lure of the Local” by Lucy Lippard, a book about place, memory, and from an art critic’s perspective about where artists work with both in a multi-centered society. Enough Pie’s intent to engage with creative placemaking and guerrilla art appealed to me intellectually and creatively.

Like most people, when I connect with something strongly, ideas form quickly, arriving in my mind in a complete state. It was as if I asked the question, “How could papermaking and the upper peninsula go together?” and “boom” put my palm out to catch the idea. This is what fell in: I would take pulp to the streets, include clothing and paper collected from the community, pulped as inclusions in the vat, and show those living and working here how to make handmade paper. Once the paper was dry, I would make an artists’ book, stitching, crocheting, and gluing the sheets of community made paper together. The book would be twelve feet long or longer to represent as many makers as possible. It would stay in the community.”

Read more about the process of turning fiber or plant material into paper on Kris’s blog where she describes the genesis and purpose of Street Pulp.

We can’t wait to create together. Hope you will join and spread the word!