WINNER: Awagami Paper Award in Recognition of the use of Handmade Paper – a selection of Awagami Editioning papers to the value of over AUD$500 - recognising the use of handmade, artisanal and/or non-commercial paper.
WINNER: Cocoon Designs Public Vote Award $500
Enlace #2 is truly a globe-spanning work - created by French artist Aïdée Bernard whist she was undertaking a residency Costa Rica earlier this year.
Aïdée Bernard is a rare woman who intimately mingles with nature, earth, water. Nature - with its variety and its creativity - offers her wild plants that she gathers and cooks for fibre extraction and thus makes her paper on which she writes words, words from others or her own. Whilst in Costa Rica, Aïdée used tropical plants which she did not know, experimenting with different varieties to find those from which she could extract cellulose fibres.
Describing the process, Aïdée says: ‘What a joy to discover the vegetable laces of the big leaves of tropical trees! Then I worked in large screen immersed in vats of water, where I created each paper that makes up the dress. The celluloses are fixed together by water, there is no need for glue, it is a natural hydrogen bond that allows the assembly because the fibres have been previously cleaned by soda. All papers, even those on which you write, are made this way! To assemble the papers of the dress I sewed it with the cabuya fibre that I extracted. The dress is made of vegetable fibres of babananier, cacao, cabuya and other fibres of the jungle.
Aïdée Bernard lives and works in the south of France. It was not until she graduated art school that she discovered paper art and papermaking, and it has since become her dedicated medium. ‘…my desire [is] to create works that breathe, that dance, that melt with the cycles. Works that offer themselves as sensitive crossings and testify to the encounter between the plant world and the human world.’
Materials: Handmade paper plants, celluloses fibres extracted by ashes, gathered and cooked by Aïdée Bernard: cacao leaves, kapok, Carroubo, banana, leaves of the Costa Rican rainforest.
Artist’s Website
Clip of Aïdée in Costa Rica working with the plants