Fifty One

CHEMENG 2SC | Summer 2024

Art derived from nature

Overview

A paper mosaic created entirely from plant matter & other natural materials.

Utilizing the chemical properties of natural materials to unify them into a cohesive whole. Arrangement inspired by Rosalind Franklin’s Photo 51.

MATERIALS: Making Paper: Abaca (banana leaf fiber), cotton, tap water. Making Dyes: fresh & dried flowers, distilled water. Mounting: wood panel.

TOOLS: Mold & deckle (papermaking screens), hot plate, flasks, beakers, filter paper, funnels

TIMELINE: 1 week

PROCEDURE

I. Papermaking

Making paper from natural fibers

Use a blender to blend Abaca, cotton, and water into a pulp.
Pour the pulp into a large basin of water.
Submerge the mold & deckle into the water and sift upwards until the screen has a uniform layer of pulp on top.
Flip the screen over onto a plexiglass plate. Use a paper towel or sponge to press the excess water out of the pulp.
Remove the screen and let the paper dry.

General Procedure

First Iteration

Attempted to blend the flowers directly into the paper pulp.

Fiber Material Used: just Abaca, no cotton.
Problems:

Since the flowers were so dry, the color stayed within the flowers instead of releasing into the paper mixture.
Resulted in speckled paper, rather than paper with a solid color.
Paper had a rough texture due to the flower chunks trapped between the fibers.
Paper was also very thin, somewhat translucent, and beige colored instead of white.

Second Iteration

Made sheets of plain white paper to later dye different colors.

Since blending the flowers directly into the paper didn’t work as intended, I decided to separate the process into two parts:

(1) Making plain paper and letting the sheets fully dry.
(2) Boiling the flowers to create dyes, then dyeing each sheet of plain paper a different color.

Modifications:

Paper: for this iteration, I made my paper using a 2:1 ratio of Abaca to cotton, which allowed me to keep the paper strong while making it more absorbent and brighter white in color.

II. Extracting Dyes

Boiled flowers of various colors in hot water to extract the pigments from within.

i. Boiling

To extract the dyes, I added each type of a flower to its own beaker of water. I then placed them on a hot plate to boil until the solutions became deep in color.

Finally, I let the flowers to steep for at least 2-3 hours (or overnight) to allow the color to fully saturate.

Initial swatches on cotton test strips.

ii. Filtration

Some dyes had a considerable amount of dirt and solids mixed in after boiling (ex. rosehips, lily). Once the boiling process was complete, I used filter paper & gravity filtration to extract the sediments and obtain a clearer dye.

Gravity filtration.

Filter papers with residual sediments.

iii. Mixing additional colors

Due to the difficulty of finding flowers that would yield green, blue, or purple dyes, I chose to mix some of my existing dyes together to produce these missing colors.

Challenges:

Difficulty extracting blue and purple dyes (most flowers ended up turning yellow)
Some colors were very dilute, required extensive time boiling, and yielded very little dye in the end

Green dye mixed from yellow & blue dyes (Lotus + Butterfly Pea Tea).

Final swatches on cotton test strips.

III. Dyeing the paper

Poured dyes onto plexiglass panels to dye each paper a different color.

With the sheets of paper still attached to the plexiglass panels, I poured the dyes directly onto the panels to dye the papers different colors.

Challenges:

Originally considered using a sponge to apply the dye, but the paper was too delicate and would disintegrate if any shear was applied.
Since I only produced a limited amount of dye for each color, a sponge would waste too much dye by soaking it up.

Pouring the dyes worked well in saturating the paper and producing a deeper color.