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Crescendo (DSC9758), ink on handmade paper, 39"h x 25-3/8"w, 2009

Water Works: Surface Tension
New Drawings by Sky Pape
June Kelly Gallery
February 5 — March 6, 2010

An exhibition entitled Water Works: Surface Tension by Sky Pape — dynamic drawings featuring vestiges of ink bubbles on paper, which again prove the artist's ability to push the boundaries of the medium — opened at June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on February 5 and was on view through March 6, 2010.

In Pape's recent work considering water as both medium and muse, her primary means of creating these drawings is an unconventional process — working on the floor, blowing ink through tubes and funnels, she uses the air in her lungs to propel the ink and "breathe" the drawings to life. The ink drawings, abstract by nature, manage to strongly elicit elements and forces in the natural world.

Pape's fascination with water, that finite and endangered substance crucial to all life, stems from her affinity with nature. "It is the abstract essence of that world that forms the core of my work, and drawing helps me understand a deeply felt personal bond with nature: my place within it, relationship to it, and responsibility to care for it," says Pape.

Fascinated with both the complex discipline of drawing and the handmade papers she uses, Pape views her work as a collaboration with distant paper-makers across the globe. Mr. Heizaburo Iwano, a Japanese papermaker Pape greatly esteems, is famous throughout the world as one of the only living papermakers capable of producing the large-scale paper of such exceptional quality used by Pape for the biggest pieces in this new body of work.

It is Pape's belief that drawing underpins vast amounts of modern life — from what we wear to the buildings we inhabit, our transportation, maps, machines, technology, and more. "But," she cautions, "clearly, we get ourselves into hot water when modern society believes it can divorce itself from the natural world." And by using art to investigate and interpret the systems, structures, and wide-ranging ways that we connect with the natural world of today, Pape seeks to energize that connection, encouraging a response where wonderment triumphs over indifference and cynicism.

[Read more about this work in the Manhattan Times, and on Drawn Together.
See more images from this series.]