I’ve been using my time stuck indoors to experiment with creating my own materials — a result of having excess time to learn new processes, coupled with a lack of foresight and failure to stock up before the closure of non-essential businesses. I’ve made tempera paint with eggs, inks with cabbage and tea, and today my own recycled paper with a jury-rigged mold and deckle. And none of them have come out as expected. Aside from trying to keep extraneous online shopping to a minimum, I am confronted with the question of what it means to spend hours of frustration to create products far below the quality standards of commercially-manufactured goods. The process is the point! I can pretty much guarantee there isn’t another sheet of paper out there exactly like this one, wrinkled and textured by the dish towels I pressed it in overnight. Nor is there an ink that has depth and character in the same way that this one does. Opening up all the variables to the maker allows for their influence to come in at every stage of the process, so even though my ink smells somewhat swampy and the paper is lumpy and inconsistent, each resulting material contains a small piece of my history: where I found the materials, the recipes I followed, the mistakes I made along the way. It feels like it’s truly mine. The scrap paper used to protect my table from spills becomes a record of the adventure. And putting the philosophy aside, there is of course the pure fun of Science! Exploring and understanding how things are made and how they work is itself a creative act. Seeing red cabbage come out of a boiling pot of water a radiant cobalt blue is an uncommon joy greater than anything I experienced in high school chemistry. Now is not the time to worry about perfection. The situation we’re living in is exceedingly imperfect. But I have found that when the focus shifts away from a predetermined result and onto the excitement of kitchen chemistry and an improvised process, within all the haphazard messiness lies a wealth of creativity. - Chad Brown, Center for Creativity Assistant. Find Chad's work on Instagram.
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