The newsprint you hold in your hand, if you’re reading this in print, is both art and technology. It is easily folded, torn, organized into sections, manipulated. It’ll absorb the ink you use to fill in the crossword puzzle, and when you’re done reading the news, you can light the woodstove with it. It may feel reassuringly solid in an age of scrolling, but you are forgetting that before it was pressed or printed, this paper was liquid.
North Bennington artist Michelle Samour showcases paper as a sculptural medium in “Paper Transformed: Artists Exploring Colored Pulp,” which she curated at the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum at the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester. The show, on view through March 29, presents works by seven members, including Samour, of the “Pulparazzi” collective — artists who use wet pulp, bonded with mineral or synthetic pigments, to build surfaces, cast forms and saturate their paper creations with color.
The exhibition takes full advantage of the Wilson Museum’s large, airy galleries to feature several sprawling, wall-size installations. One of them, Samour’s 10-by-20-foot “Land of Milk and Honey: Witness,” is composed of smaller, lacy forms in rich golds, reds and teals, attached to the wall with specimen pins. Samour creates them by drawing with squeeze bottles — think diner ketchup — filled with slushy pulp. Once dried, the cellulose becomes flexible and translucent, like a skin.
In a video on view alongside the exhibition, Samour demonstrates her process and talks about her creations, which seem to float across the wall like cells under a microscope. “Paper is a living, breathing material,” she says. “It feels to me like the perfect material to use to make these forms that are organic and very much about the living world.”
Though some of Samour’s other works primarily reference the biological, this one gives her drawings a political twist: She based her looping forms on maps of Israel and Palestine. Each one is a solid color, decorated with smaller white or colored dots resembling symbols that defend against the evil eye. Combining these elements — human-created borders, ancient cultural practices and seemingly natural organic forms — offers a new perspective on questions of displacement and diaspora, blurring the boundaries between geography, biology and heritage.
Beside Samour’s installation, a no less political one by Buffalo, N.Y., papermaker Peter Sowiski hangs heavier on the wall. “A-!0” pictures, across a 6-by-20-foot grid made up of 12 large sheets of handmade paper, an A-10 “Warthog” Thunderbolt II fighter jet in silhouette. Each panel includes a small diagram with a red dot indicating its position within the whole piece, almost as though the installation were part of the instructions for a model plane kit.
What makes the work so arresting, in addition to its scale, is the blackness that Sowiski achieves. Rather than painted or drawn on the paper, the image is part of the paper, made from black pulp. That gives it the deep density of a solid void, a place where nothingness looms menacingly against a smoky background.
Sowiski’s smaller works on view also create commentary through silhouette, directly comparing the dark shapes of weaponry with those of places of worship. The monumental scale and intrinsic power of military technology, Sowiski seems to say, have allowed it to supplant such places as sites of reverence.
In the adjacent gallery, Jamestown, R.I., sculptor Joan Hall evokes an even bigger scope with “Sailing on a Sea of Heartbreak,” a 10-by-35-foot installation that positions the viewer underwater. Long strands of pigmented and printed papers, bits of glass strung together with metal wire, and, according to the label, “plastic detritus from a submarine, oyster shells, fish scales” create a kelp forest across an entire wall.
Hall expertly deploys specificity and confusion to make something that feels like it came from the ocean. Baubles, shells and carefully cut leaves are recognizable in the morass, while other elements, such as swaths of printed, folded and cut wire fencing, aren’t clearly just one thing: These could be paper or plastic, drawn or solid, manufactured or natural. Unexplained splashes of blue or purple sit alongside translucent greens and deep reds. From a distance, paper fibers make a convincing algae-like haze. The piece is both sad and beautiful, evocative of an ocean realm on the verge of ecological collapse.
Shannon Brock, of Montgomery City, Mo., shifts the view entirely, bringing us above the clouds with “The Angel’s Perspective.” Round balls of different sizes, each painted with colorful triangles like the sections of an orange, protrude from the wall in clusters; though they look abstract, they’re meant to portray how hot-air balloons would appear from above. Though you wouldn’t necessarily know the pieces are hollow, they do seem to have an inflated lightness and an airy, joyous tone that’s a nice counterbalance to some of the headier works in the show.
Colesville, Md., artist Lynn Sures brings us all the way back to earth, and then some, with “Printed Through Time and Space” — 98 paper-pulp pieces that undulate across the wall, stacked salon-style, each with a colorful imprint of a foot. They are larger than life size, each almost 24 inches high, recalling thermal images in their cobalt blues, emerald greens, violets and reds on sandy backgrounds. The paper is embossed with swirls and whorls like a fingerprint. The feet, a label explains, are based on fossilized footprints made by early humans walking the same route in East Africa from millions to tens of thousands of years ago, leaving traces of their movement through wet ash; it notes that “Everyone alive today is descended from these shared ancestors.”
The piece provokes a sense of shared history and connection with the material that’s present throughout the works in the show and perhaps most apparent in an informational display where the artists provide samples of their work that visitors can touch and hold. Direct contact with the forms and textures they’ve created with pulp offers an intimate contrast to the massive scale of the installations. Perhaps it will remind readers that for a full experience, you’ve got to pick up the paper. ➆
“Paper Transformed: Artists Exploring Colored Pulp,” on view through March 29 at the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum, Southern Vermont Arts Center, in Manchester. Closing reception with artist remarks, Sunday, March 29, 3-5 p.m.
This article appears in February 18 • 2026.
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