Tarpaper Roses

Tarpaper Roses are included in the summer group show “Introducing...” at the Clark Gallery in Lincoln MA. I made a series of pieces specifically for the show, planning them as a unit that hang together to form a black and white grid on the wall. The picture shows the layout, the sizes (h x w x d) of the three different units from left are: 40” x 20” x 10”, 40” x 50” x 18”, and 15” x 17” x 7”. The largest one weighs about 50 pounds!

What a production! Just planning the base for the pieces involved endless steps. Of course I wanted to use a single sheet of plywood efficiently, have a minimum number of cuts, and end up with pieces that would fit into my car without destroying even more of the door gaskets. A fellow artist pointed out that at the larger sizes, ½” plywood would be too heavy, and I would be better off using ¼” sheets and banding them with 1” x 2” strips on the rear for support. Ok, that just meant now figuring out the total lengths of wood for the support, and then planning how to lay them out. A few missteps along the way: make sure to screw the boards together before the glue dries and the clamps are removed! In the end they worked out great, very solidly attached and rigid. Phew.

Then to fill them with roses: I wanted to have a range of sizes, and on the larger pieces, I needed to fill the space, so that meant making really big roses to form a framework. There is a relationship between the width of the paper strip and length needed to fold the rose, and for larger roses, the strips end up being unwieldy! Carole Andrews makes giant sculptures out of tarpaper forming them over an aluminum structure and getting inside them with a blowtorch to weld the seams (!), well working with the paper is not only very tactile, but gets very physical as well.