A bear’s head with a cape of hessian. A cat-like fanged beast with flares of fringing. A large-eared donkey woven from brown paper. Human costumes accompany this bestiary: white dandelion-seed cut-outs make a veil for a colourful floral headpiece, and repurposed brown packaging forms a robe of draped, twisted and braided paper, hung with small woven baskets and moulded paper-pulp trinkets of a bird’s head, sun and moon. This is paired with a crown of antlered branches garlanded with leaves cut from handmade nettle-fibre paper.
These striking puppets and costumes, created by paper artist Amy Williams to conclude her Arts Council-funded Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) project ‘Progressing with Paper’, currently sit quietly in her studio in Kendal. Yet I can almost hear the rustling sounds of each sculptural paper form in movement, a profusion of texture and carnivalesque play.
Williams’ DYCP funding has enabled a ten-month period of experimentation, in which she sought to broaden her practice and make it more sustainable. This sustainability applies not only to environmentalism but also Williams’ artmaking in a wider sense, the practicalities of time and finances, and the development of skills in paper that would be more accessible for workshops and school groups, using weaving and paper pulp rather than the intricate pattern cutting she favoured in earlier periods of her practice. She tells me that she wanted to cultivate the tools to find ‘different ways of using paper that I could engage the community with more.’
Although Williams’ focus was the growth of her own skills, for her the end goal has always been future work inviting community participation. Her involvement with community art and her individual practice continuously ‘feed into each other or feed off each other.’ As part of the creative team behind Kendal’s annual Torchlight festival and parade, Williams worked with a local refugee group for the 2024 procession. In addition, she made her first giant puppet lantern, in the shape of a swallow, having attended a puppet-making course with artist Andrew Kim. ‘There’s a bug that I’ve got!’ Williams says of these experiences. ‘Doing that parade, there’s something around that immediate connection with the spectator, with my audience, that I loved. There’s something I like about puppetry, that it’s bringing art to the community. I think it engages everybody.’
‘Progressing with Paper’ has involved learning from other craft practitioners, like Tom Frith-Powell of the Paper Foundation in nearby Burneside, where Williams spent a four-day residency learning how to make paper by hand at their mill. There is a rich local heritage in the paper industry: the foundation is owned by Mark Cropper of James Cropper Speciality Paper, which dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, and donated paper for several of Williams’s previous works. Initially studying sculpture at art school, Williams has used paper since her MA in Illustration and Sequential Design at Brighton, which she studied from 2005 to 2007. She made framed, illustrative cutouts before starting to create larger scale sculptural works. In Williams’ words, paper appeals to her for its ‘simplicity and purity, and the way it reacts to light. And it’s such an accessible medium as well.’
During her residency at the Paper Foundation, Williams explored making paper from organic and recycled fibres, such as nettles, old rope, sedge, hessian bags, marram grass from Roan Head beach, and rag cotton from old sheets and sweatshirts. Initially consulting a sustainability coach to discuss foraging ethically, she made sure not to take too much from any one place and gained permission to gather the marram in a conservation area from the ranger of Sandscale Haws National Nature Reserve.
Traditional papermaking requires the cellulose in plants to bond its fibres into pulp, making it a fitting medium for using and recycling organic matter. Paper’s ultimate ability to compost away is particularly valuable to Williams, diminishing its environmental impact. Papermaking is a relatively simple yet drawn out and physical process, involving a great deal of chemistry and exploration with various ‘recipes’. Williams first had to prepare her gathered materials at home by breaking them down using heat and soda ash (the most common chemical used in papermaking), referring to Helen Herbert’s Paper Making with Garden Plants and Common Weeds (2006). At the mill, the fibres are beaten in a machine, diluted in a vat, and a metal mould is used to form sheets, allowing the water to drain away. Afterwards, the paper is ‘couched’: placed between sheets of wool felt to squeeze out the excess water, then compressed into stacks and dried.
Each plant fibre Williams used had its own unique effect on the qualities of the resulting paper. ‘The marram grass one feels almost sandy,’ she says, ‘and it’s from the beach!’ This marks a development from past works, which utilised a smooth-surfaced paper, such as the abundant wildflower sculptures Williams made for Unearthed (2023), an exhibition celebrating the lives of ten Cumbrian women at Blackwell Arts and Crafts House. Williams shows me her nettle paper in the studio, dark green and slightly translucent, its surface crazed with fine lines. ‘They’ve got a real inconsistency in the translucency and the thickness,’ she tells me, ‘but that quality I really loved about it.’
This embrace of the organic extended into the basketry that Williams learned with Lorna Singleton, one of the few ‘swillers’ in the UK, a specialist in weaving traditional spelk baskets using coppiced oak and hazel, first recorded in the fifteenth century. Learning some of Singleton’s methods meant that Williams could sculpt paper structures more evocative of the natural world. ‘Paper has its limitations in terms of being able to create organic shapes,’ Williams explains. ‘It’s very suitable for creating planes and angles but it’s quite hard to create round shapes.’ Using basketry techniques means ‘you’re weaving the paper in different directions, so I can create forms that I couldn’t have created before.’
Both spelk basketry and papermaking by hand are marked as ‘critically endangered’ by the Heritage Crafts charity. This is one of the reasons why the Paper Foundation is committed to championing the paper arts, aiming to support a ‘living community’ at Burneside. One of their initiatives is to revive sixteenth-century Renaissance techniques by using coarser wool for their felt sheets to emulate their unique textures, perhaps from the famous Herdwick or Rough Fell sheep breeds of Cumbria. They maintain that this is not about fetishising older methods but seeking quality in materials for artists and practitioners. Williams’ work expresses the preciousness of these time-consuming, handmade processes. Handmade paper contains traces of the maker’s individual hand and decisions, which Williams embraces enthusiastically: ‘it’s not going to be a mechanically, perfectly formed thing.’
Living in Kendal for over fifteen years after leaving Brighton, much of Williams’ art is grounded in a sense of locality, from the mill at Burneside to the annual Torchlight processions. She points to the growth of the Cumbrian Arts & Culture Network (CACN) as a resource for creative community across Cumbria, hosting online training events and talks. ‘I think that’s one of the things I’ve loved about being an artist in Cumbria is that connection to the community,’ Williams says. ‘Somehow people have this yearning to connect.’ One key source of inspiration for the puppets and costumes she made for her DYCP project were the Ulverston-based artists Sue Gill and John Knox. They founded Welfare State International (WSI) in 1968, a collective of artists who wanted ‘to create art that integrates with people’s lives,’ often though street performances and public spectacles like lantern festivals. The mechanics of Williams’ donkey puppet, which the puppeteer climbs inside and draws up around them to operate, were partly drawn from WSI handbook Engineers of the Imagination (1983), edited by Tony Coult and Baz Kershaw.
Williams is full of ideas about how she might use the ‘learnings’ of ‘Progressing with Paper’ for community art, perhaps through communal foraging for papermaking, using weaving as a collaborative project, and working with performers and school groups to make puppets and costumes. Feeling that her practice is in a state of transition – which is exciting but also vulnerable – the DYCP grant has helped to build ‘that bank of knowledge to inspire me forward. I feel like I would like to develop work that has a more ceremonial aspect, things that have meaning and purpose in people’s lives outside the context of the gallery. That really interests me.’
Williams sends me images from a recent photoshoot in woodland near Silverdale, with friends wearing and animating her ‘Progressing with Paper’ works. They pose and interact with each other, the mottled patterns of the natural surroundings complementing the textured layers of the costumes and animal puppets. ‘Everyone really got into it!’ she smiles. This sense of playfulness encapsulates her art practice. I always feel like there’s been an element of play in my work,’ she tells me. ‘I feel like that helps me in my creativity, but I think it then helps people engage. They enter into the spirit of it.’
Amy Williams is a visual artist working with local communities and organisations to create work that bring stories to life and communities together. www.amywilliamscreative.com
Iona Glen is a writer and researcher currently based in Edinburgh. Her mother’s family has lived in West Cumbria since the 1970s.
This article is supported by Arts Council England.
Published 19.02.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Interviews
1,615 words
