Description
Instinctively we know, via chip packets and discarded napkins, that grease both marks and transforms paper. Through its thickness, something is revealed. This characteristic, its transparency, is the appeal and distraction of the medium. For although it permits copying, it may equally mask connections. Once lifted and displaced it gains autonomy, capturing notions afresh, allowing new ideas to enter, interrupt and solidify. This capacity to hide and to reveal complicates it’s designation in many archives as a secondary, ephemeral and notorious unstable medium. Drawing out, drawing under, drawing through, this butter paper aims to wrap the slipperiness of procedural traces in architecture.The notion of transparent paper, or trace, is wrapped up in the techniques, materials and artefacts of its presence. ‘Trace’ can designate equally the surface upon which the drawing is made, the operation itself and the drawing - which is to say the traced copy. Drawing breath, this research seminar paper aims to explore this very complication, this fattening of the surface, to introduce at transparent paper as a topic of research in itself. Butter paper, as with all translucent paper types however, excludes air. This negation reduces the diffusion of light at the interfaces of its material to facilitate light transmission. In this paper, I will document three main methods used to produce this transparency and look at three drawings produced using these procedures to draw out some lines of enquiry for discussion and elaboration using the seminar format.
Cheap, dispensable, disposable, this butter paper comprises a way into the topic, aiming towards a degree of clarification.
| Period | 30 Oct 2019 |
|---|---|
| Held at | Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture |
| Degree of Recognition | Regional |