Marie Payró
Chiapas, Mexico
Instagram: @mariesolpf

Fibers and water
2022
Lithography and movable types on paper handmade from pineapple fibers,cotton and papyrus, codex type craft binding
7x 3x 0.78

Marie Sol Payró

The book “Fibers and Water” presents a window into the processes of creating handmade paper. Focusing above all on the processes of handmade paper in Mexico, where the history of paper goes back to pre-Columbian times, being little known and disseminated. Today there are some handmade paper workshops, where the raw materials are collected from the forest, without cutting down the trees following friendly and respectful processes with the environment. I consider it important to emphasize, disseminate and show these trades through art.

This project was born as a recognition and homage to this trade, from the reflection that handmade paper is not only a surface on which one simply draws, but also has an intrinsic symbology with inherent characteristics of both the material of which it is made, as well as a cultural heritage related to the symbolic and interculturality of the techniques.

Through this project, which is part of a master’s degree in Visual Arts Research from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, I made an artist book that recognizes the processes and poetics that exist in the ancestral trade of making paper from branches, leaves and plants. In it, I simultaneously recognize and make a link to the work of Leñateros Workshop, a workshop of artisan books made by indigenous women in Tsotsil and Tseltal languages, its important history as an independent, intercultural cooperative in San Cristóbal de Las Casas and its relationship with the forest and ecological perspective.

I consider this project important since, delving into the processes, the symbology and the deep use of the elements that surround us, makes us use them with greater awareness, with respect and care. Those who know where things come from, how they are manufactured, and the processes of their transformation, have the opportunity to understand and experience other possibilities of understanding, as well as forming a more significant relationship with them.

What does it mean to make paper with traditional and manual methods today? What poetics are rescued? What values are preserved? What sounds and senses are recreated? How do the forest and the paper not let go of each other?

These are some of the questions that I address and explore through this artist’s book in order to recognize and value the craft of making paper by hand, with an ecological and intercultural perspective as is the case of Leñateros Workshop.

The book was made on handmade paper with cotton, pineapple and papyrus fibers. The text was printed in movable type and the images in lithography, with an edition of 105 units in collaboration with La Ceiba Grafica.

The images arose from an artistic practice with the members of Leñateros Workshop, as well as the account of poetics, resilience and symbolic materialities of the trade of turning plant leaves into book pages.

It is a book that invites to be read in multiple ways, it can be linear from left to right, without interruption since it is a cycle; it can be in pairs of images, since they are arranged in pairs and correspond to a type of poetry of encounter and contrasting images; it can be read as a sculpture that varies in shape as it is handled; and other forms yet to be experimented with.