Art review: Surprises abound in paper-works by high-profile artists

Bottom line: Innovations in handmade paper-based art are explored in a show featuring a number of high-profile artists.

The most commonplace of materials, paper, turns out to be a surprisingly malleable, creative and expressive medium as seen in the artworks on view in “Pure Pulp: Contemporary Artists Working in Paper at Dieu Donné” at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking at Georgia Tech.

Organized by the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College and housed in two small rooms inside the Georgia Tech-affiliated museum fronting 10th Street, the exhibition features a roster of some very big names in the contemporary art world: among them William Kentridge, Richard Tuttle and Glenn Ligon. The works were all created at the nonprofit New York City papermaking studio Dieu Donné.

Founded in 1976, Dieu Donné creates residencies for both established and emerging artists in which they can learn to work with handmade paper and expand their material horizons. The artwork in “Pure Pulp” represents some of the artists who have delved into this medium over the past 15 years. Works are created not on paper, but by using handmade paper pulp that can be colored with pigment and manipulated like a sculptural material or paint, making it something far different from what we think of as “works on paper.”

For such a small exhibition, “Pure Pulp” packs a punch, filled with political and social statements as well as purely artistic ones. There are formal experiments that use paper in novel ways, like Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s fascinating merging of thread and cotton with paper. Though those works focus on architecture, “Blueprint” and “Staircase” have the ethereal feel of dreamscapes (his works often center on memories of homes the artist has occupied throughout his life) in the artist’s strange fusing of distinct materials into something new. And then there are works more grounded in contemporary social issues like Suzanne McClelland’s “Internal Affairs,” a work in shades of chimerical gray and black portraits of domestic terrorists on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list that gives an ominous sense of danger lurking in our midst.

But “Pure Pulp”’s undeniable standout in impact and imagination may be South African artist Kentridge’s “Sheets of Evidence.” Kentridge has created a sexy, mysterious dossier that reveals its secrets only upon closer examination, much like evidence that unfolds in a crime scene investigation.

Contained within a plain tan box, the 18 sheets of seemingly plain white paper hold a special surprise. When you view the pages over the provided light table, blankness gives way to saucy revelation in a series of watermark drawings that are revealed upon exposure to light, many of them featuring couples in flagrante delicto of every different, acrobatic sort. Despite the slightly seamy content, the work as a whole is sublimely delicate and poetic, and creates a strange sensation in their viewing, a feeling of both furtiveness and exaltation in sharing in a secret exchanged between artist and audience.

Other artists deliver comparably sophisticated material, including Ian Cooper’s “Chalice,” which turns something ordinary — a baseball cap — into something singular that the artist has created by hand. Cooper’s enormous hat crafted from paper pulp blended with denim and long ropes of attached dreadlocks made from pulp and plastic was inspired by a tabloid newspaper image of Michael Jackson’s son, which gives the object the feel of a talisman or something ordinary rendered extraordinary by the artist’s meticulous treatment.

And that is a truth that emerges again and again in “Pure Pulp”: how a seemingly known material can be cast in a different light and in that process of transformation, create fresh ripples of surprise and understanding.