Ecologies of Papermaking: Craft, Rags and Plants

Abstract

This essay asks how ecological thinking might be strengthened by the act of making things—specifically paper—with our own bodies. By ecological thinking, I refer to Diane Kelsey McColley's invitation to bring ecological inquiry into our approach to material culture by asking ‘where our artifacts come from, with what cost to the earth, to habitats, to species, to individuals of those species, and in human labour’.¹ I argue that viewing paper within an ecology of making reveals the potential of craft to ground ecological knowledge in sensory experiences and embodied interactions with more-than-human agencies. This is how I understand Timothy Barrett's claim that, ‘A handmade sheet of paper provides documentation or physical evidence of a dialogue between human beings and nature’.² In The Craftsman, Richard Sennett challenges Hannah Arendt's claims that making is a morally or intellectually neutral activity, taking place on another dimension from intellectual thought. Sennett's understanding of craft proposes the opposite: rather than shutting out the world, craft is a process of actively analysing, engaging with, and understanding the world. For Sennett, ‘making is thinking’, because ‘all skills, even the more abstract, begin as bodily practices’.³ Craft facilitates this dialogue, augmenting our capacity for ecological thinking through embodied knowledge, interspecies relationships and material sensitivity. Making paper by hand offers a way to access and rethink ecological relationships: how plants and humans shape one another, how materials behave and resist, and how waste and reuse structure systems of value.

In this essay, I reflect on my own experiments with papermaking in dialogue with craft theory, critical plant studies, and examples from the long history of papermaking with linen rags to show how sensory, embodied encounters with plant materials like flax can foster deeper ecological knowledge. I account for plants as co-practitioners in the craft process, seeing long-term human–plant relationships as co-constituting, affective encounters between plants and the humans who planted, harvested and crafted them. The experiences and embodied knowledges of contemporary craftspeople who draw on historical knowledge represent the human side of this dialogue, while critical plant studies scholars Michael Marder and Natasha Myers offer conceptual tools to articulate how plants themselves participate in papermaking. Building on my own experiences of making paper with textiles and plant materials, I reflect on historical examples from the early modern tradition of rag paper, in which human and flax relations were shaped through labour, reuse, and degradation, and contemporary practices using waste fibres, to show how papermaking reimagines material excess in the form of waste.

My experiences with paper and papermaking, although amateur, offer tangible insights into the value of making as a mode of inquiry. In September 2022, thanks to the support of Dr. Nelleke Moser and Special Collections librarian Willemien van Dijk, I sat down to look at early modern printed books from the vaults of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Library. The pages were crisp, translucent and often unevenly textured: they were full of husks, speckles, lumps and gaps. The texture was so unlike the smooth, uniformly pale pages of the paper in my notebook that I found myself lingering in curiosity. I kept finding lumps of fibres, threads clumped in knots, leaving indentations pressed into the opposite page. The presence of threads should not have been surprising: from its introduction into Europe from China until the 19th century, paper was made from rags.⁴ Yet it still surprised me that so many threads and fibres had resisted the process that turned rags into paper, turning up centuries later as evidence of their own material and ecological histories: how had these sturdy, durable sheets of paper come from used rags? Why had the processes of bleaching, retting and stamping worked on some fibres and not on others? I decided to try it out for myself.

Early modern papermakers typically used linen or hemp rags, so I bought a yard of white linen fabric and cut it up into small pieces.⁵ Without access to historical equipment like a mill-powered stamper or a Hollander beater, I turned to a kitchen blender. I tried to blend the fabric pieces using different settings, different water-to-fabric ratios in the pulp, and paused frequently to detangle the threads that gathered around the blades. But even after many attempts, my linen scraps never managed to form a uniformly soft, blended pulp. The sheets that I managed to scoop out of the vat and into the mould and deckle were thick, lumpy and full of holes. My tactile struggle with the material reframed my initial experience in the archive. The 17th-century rag paper I had seen was a functional, mostly uniform surface that contained a few clumps of resistant fibres; what I made in my blender was mostly a collection of unruly threads, with a few patches here and there of fibres that had been processed enough to yield something I recognised as paper.

Making paper on my own focussed my attention on the materials: I saw the fibres as my primary collaborators. But making paper in a workshop setting brought my attention to other people as collaborators, bringing their knowledge, labour and experience into the process of making. During the papermaking workshop at The Paper Foundation in Cumbria at the Paper and Poetry Symposium in September 2023, I found that the papermaker's professional tools—traditional moulds, deckles, couching felts, a press, and a Hollander beater—allowed for a level of control, predictability and repetition that I had not been able to find on my own. In contrast to the clumped pulp from the blender, this pulp, processed in a Hollander beater, formed soft clouds of fibre that sank evenly into the deckle frame. The participants of the symposium took turns trying out the traditional roles of vatman and coucher, alternately scooping and draining the pulp and pressing the sheet into the felt. No one person had ownership over the process of making, which meant that the sense of failure or success of a given sheet of paper was also dispersed, not only between human and plant but also among humans.

Both the experience of making paper on my own and in a workshop setting reflected Joshua Calhoun's notion of papermaking as embedded in ‘environmental negotiations of people and things, of humans, humanists and nonhumans’.⁶ In the case of the workshop experience, a good deal of the negotiating had already taken place before I entered the room, through the development of tools and techniques building on generations of knowledge and experience, and through the tactile expertise and guidance of specific practitioners: Tom Frith-Powell and Samantha Newby. In early modern papermaking, that negotiation would have extended even further to involve the many uses of linen fabric on its way to becoming rags. My experiences echoed Calhoun's point, revealing the long-term historical and social, as well as environmental negotiations involved in papermaking.

In using newly bought linen fabric in my blender experiment, I had skipped over the steps of use and re-use that are vital to the process of making rag paper. The fibres in linen fabrics are best suited to papermaking after being broken down through repeated use. Flax fibres have a biochemical structure (a combination of cellulose, pectin and lignin) that gives them more rigidity and tensile strength compared to softer fibres like cotton (mostly composed of cellulose).⁷ These bast fibres are also difficult to access, because they need to be extracted from the phloem layer that wraps around the plant's woody stem. When extracting the fibres by hand, flax has to be pulled, dried, rippled, retted, broken, scutched and hackled to remove the excess material carefully without losing the length of the fibres needed to spin linen thread.⁸ Early modern papermakers would not have used newly spun linen fabric to make paper, but instead they used cloth that had already passed through a number of dirty and unglamorous uses before being disposed of as a rag. As Heidi Craig explains,

The system of cascading use of surrounding rag paper was dependent on social actors whose participation in the papermaking ecosystem came at a high cost. Rag-gatherers ‘went from house to house collecting old rags and cloth in exchange for small coins or objects, such as pins or thimbles; others picked rags out of rubbish piles’.¹² As Craig writes, these labourers experienced ‘physical and social marginalisation’ in early modern England, facing both an inferior social status as well as harsh physical conditions.¹³ Prohibitions on the use of cloth from bubonic plague victims suggest some of the real health and safety risks borne by these workers through their potential exposure to disease from infected rags.¹⁴ The ecological circularity of rag-papermaking, turning waste into a valuable product, was only possible because of the social and bodily vulnerability of rag-pickers, flax spinners and agricultural workers who participated in each step of the transformation of flax to paper.

Although my at-home experiment did not give me the usable paper that I expected, it did give me a sense of deep curiosity and awareness of the plant fibres' resistance and action: I wanted to know more about what these fibres were and why they behaved the way that they did. According to Maarit Mäkelä, as the craftsperson deepens their knowledge of and experience with the specific materials of their craft, they develop a sensitivity to the ‘non-human material world’, ‘perceiv[ing] the material as having an active role’.¹⁵ Through craft, I sensed how the fibres resisted the process of breaking down in the blender, perceiving on a tactile level the participation of fibres. I also gained a sense of humility and respect both for the flax plant itself and for the effectiveness of traditional hand craft techniques. Seeing and touching the fibres, as well as experiencing resistance, difficulty and failure, gave me an affective link with the plant that I could not have gained through research alone.

The material encounter that takes place through craft work with plant materials is a meeting of human and plant agencies. Plants express their agency through what Michael Marder calls ‘non-conscious intentionality’, in ways that might not necessarily align with our human assumptions about what counts as action and participation. Because plants are so ‘dependent on exteriority’, plant subjectivities are ‘dispersed’ as ‘a mode of being in relation to all the others’.¹⁶ Plants are inherently in interrelationship with other beings, including humans, making them inherently open to collaboration. While Marder understands plant-being as ‘merg[ing] with the external environment, to which it is completely beholden’, Natasha Myers interprets the relationally oriented nature of plants as capable of more active participation (even with a distinctly plant-like subjectivity).¹⁷ We may also understand plant agency as expressing itself on a co-evolutionary level. Myers' concept of ‘involutionary momentum’ moves beyond the notion of evolutionary processes as passive and mechanical, proposing instead an understanding of ‘plants as practitioners’ who shape and are shaped by their affective relationships with other species.¹⁸ This reframing allows us to approach the long-term development of human–flax relationships as co-constituting, agential and active from both sides, an affective encounter between plants and the humans who harvested, crafted and planted them. ‘Involutionary momentum’, Myers writes ‘helps us to get a feel for affective push and pull among bodies, including the affinities, ruptures, enmeshments and repulsions among organisms constantly inventing new ways to live with and alongside one another’.¹⁹

My curiosity about flax plants and fibres has led me to participate in the Craft Council Netherlands' project ‘1 m2 vlas’, part of the Linen Project, which investigates the viability of small-scale flax production and offers participants step-by-step instruction on planting and processing techniques. At the time of writing, a waist-high patch of flax is flowering in my back garden. This is the first time that I have interacted with flax plants on a daily basis, and I now experience flax as a living being (often requiring my care and attention) and not just as a botanical material. I see each plant's individuated response to changes in sunlight, a month of drought, bursts of wind, competition from weeds and shadows from the nearby fence. If the plants make it through to the end of the growing season, I will harvest them and take them to a flax-processing workshop hosted by the Crafts Council. The process will come full circle. An affective curiosity sparked by a few lumps of fibre in an old book somehow drew me into a millennia-long interspecies collaboration between humans and flax.

While traditional rag paper relied on cultures of textile reuse, contemporary craft practices are reimagining what kinds of waste might become material. Inspired by papermaker Helen Hieber's book Papermaking with Garden Plants and Common Weeds, I started searching in my kitchen, garden and neighbourhood for plant fibres that would otherwise be removed or discarded. Could I use papermaking to redirect streams of waste or overabundance? I started seeing papermaking fibres everywhere: in the overgrown stinging nettles growing on the side of the road and in the box of discarded corn husks at the supermarket. In the spring, I joined a workshop with Rotterdam-based artist Marieke de Hoop focussed on using locally available plant materials. During the workshop, we made paper pulps with green leek tops, stinging nettles, iris stems and banana peels, as well as mixtures of cotton and raw flax. De Hoop showed us how to use a type of mould and deckle specially designed for small quantities of pulp—a tool that encourages experimentation when harvesting and processing only a small sample of fibres.

During this workshop, I saw the fibres in these discarded plant materials transform from structural elements that plants use to build and support themselves into components that could be reused in new ways through human intervention. The experience prompted me to reconsider what constitutes waste, and to think instead of the potential for reuse and collaboration across human and plant systems. These hands-on experiences gave me insights into the technical and material choices that shape fibre transformation. Hand papermaking is unlikely to replace industrial paper production, and its usefulness lies in changing how we think rather than offering faster or more efficient modes of production. Hand-made paper invites a closer engagement with materials: one that values time, embodied skill and careful attention towards the material qualities of plants and human interrelationships with them. The nuanced, embodied and materially oriented knowledge that comes from craft might help us develop more efficient and sustainable solutions, like in the cascading uses of linen and rag paper. But it can also help us to reflect more broadly on the interrelationships between the things we make (and use) and the environments: craft can deepen our ecological thinking. Paper is the result of an extended process of negotiation between plants and human labourers, a negotiation that begins with the body. Just as we can acknowledge the agency and creative force of the flax plant in papermaking, we can also draw attention to the agency and the creative force of practitioners of craft. Taking Sennett's view of both abstract thinking and hand crafts as beginning from embodied practices, papermaking and poetry start to share common ground. The material poetics that Kelly Hoffer develops in this issue sees poetry as a similarly embodied and ecologically embedded craft: ‘The writer’, she writes, ‘becomes one node in a web of contingencies, dependent on the weather, on muscle memory, on the resistances and affordances of her materials’.²⁰

While Sennett insists that craft can be instructive for human relationships (because materials are ‘instructive in understanding the resistances people harbour to one another or the uncertain boundaries between people’), crafting with non-human materials can be instructive for ecological relationships, providing not only the practical knowledge but also relational skills needed to forge ecological futures.²¹ This is echoed in Mäkelä's approach to craft as ‘a catalyst in realising the importance of the caring acts we need to take and persistently maintain towards the non-human world’.²² The embodied knowledge that comes from rippling flax, retting rags, or turning kitchen scraps from waste into paper enables practitioners to develop a more nuanced understanding of and relationship with their ecological worlds. Working with botanical materials requires the constant analysis and recalibration of the craftsman, an active thinking that requires practitioners to take the plant's agency into account.

Ecological thinking traces the complex relationships among objects, human labourers, consumers, plants, animals and local environments. Historical practices of craft like flax processing and rag paper can offer examples of material interrelationships that may challenge the assumptions of contemporary productive systems. Embodied knowledge of flax fibre composition and the cascading uses of linen fabrics are some of the insights that rag paper may offer to contemporary practice. However, ecological thinking will also be careful to understand these practices within social and economic contexts: rag paper depended on hard labour and difficult working conditions. Through my explorations of papermaking craft, I have considered some of the ways that crafts like papermaking and poetry hold the potential to reframe our modes of ecological engagement. Craft is an ecological practice that requires time, skill and experiential knowledge to develop. It is also an embodied and creative experience. An ecology of making reminds us that thinking needs to be embodied to be fully understood. Craft grants access to a kind of ecological thinking that only emerges through participation. I advocate for practices of craft, however amateur or inefficient, as transformative, by using our bodies, collaborations and failures to reimagine our material relationships with the world.