Making Paper Out of Fabric Scraps at Singapore Art Week 2024
After every textile art project, I always end up with a mini pile of threads and scraps of fabric. There are so many great ways to reuse and upcycle them.
Veron of the Renew Earth Sweatshop project at the Post Museum invited a few of us to experiment with turning textile waste into paper. We got out our blenders, fabric scraps and threads, and waste paper for a few days of exploration. We even explored various binders that would make it happen and turn the pieces into architectural forms that would be displayed around Objectifs during Singapore Art Week 2024.
What’s been successful
So far, we have tried modge podge, gum tragacanth and even cassava bags to bind the scraps and waste paper together into a physical form.
Gum Tragacanth
My personal favourite is using the gum tragacanth to create a paste with the scraps, and spreading this onto a very fine tulle. The paste was created using a blender - it did feel like we were in the kitchen, and the paste looked like fish paste my mum would get from the wet market! I had used the gum for silk screen printing but I wasn’t sure whether this would actually hold. After drying in the sun, the pieces held together!
Cassava Bags
This one was unusual, but a mutual friend of ours was leaving Singapore and had unused cassava bags. Unfortunately, no one wanted adopt them, so we decided to use them for our project. Cassava bags are supposed to be more eco-friendly than traditional plastic bags, and dissolve when in contact in water, or decompose under the right conditions. These bags are made from cassava, an edible root but the ability to dissolve and ‘disappear’ is due to the addition of a synthetic soluble polymer, Polyvinyl Alcohol. My artist friends suggested that we sandwich the fabric scraps with the cassava bags and iron the sandwich into paper. The result was very interesting, as the cassava bag behaved like a normal plastic bag, melting into a paper form!
Come join us !
Come join me with my lab partners!
Join the Renew Earth Sweat Shop community in a textile-to-paper lab experiment. We will be shredding textiles, pulping them and drying/molding them on elements of urban architecture to preserve a piece of the city. Come experiment with different binders and contemplate their effectiveness and their eco-footprint together!
Wed 17th, Sat 20th and Sun 21st Jan (3-7pm) Sign up at https://peatix.com/event/3813173/view
This programme is under the “Alternative Ecology: The Community’’ is an art and ecology event curated by Wang Ruobing and project managed by Susanna Tan.
