The Wrong Way to Make Paper: Stephanie Dotson
Working with handmade paper again started during the pandemic for Santa Barbara-based artist Stephanie Dotson, who took from the homesteader current of the early stay-at-home days the concept of “we’ll do the things.”
Dotson’s paper recipe is messy with a dollop of survival sensibility. When making paper, she recommends mixing some old artwork in with your used grocery bags, ripping them up before immersing the scraps in a big bowl of hot water. “Think about how disorienting it is that some things are not special at all and some things are,” she says, “and then reduce it all down to a giant soup.”
Stephanie Dotson, Untitled (Mountain, heavy rotation), photo and mixed media, 2020
Early in her career, as an art student living in Athens, Georgia, Dotson created several concert posters for REM, Widespread Panic and Green Day. A materials and process-focused artist, Dotson came up at the Kansas City Art Institute, taking part in Adriane Herman’s Slop Art Supermarket, a collaborative exhibition presented as a Penny Savor-style catalogue of work by emerging and established artists. The Slop Art Supermarket was a foundational experience for Dotson in taking away the “pedestal” from art objects and replacing it with an accessible platform.
It wasn’t long before Dotson became a maverick in her own right, developing a brand of disruption rooted in her longstanding interest in textiles (an interest that goes all the way back to her girlhood days quilting with 4-H and her grandma Clementine in Topeka, Kansas). In 2011, she began drawing braided rugs; and in 2013, she took apart the oval braided rugs themselves, reconfigured them and then hung them on the wall as geometric abstractions.
Stephanie Dotson, The Wall and How’s the Work, photo and mixed media, 2020
“Formally, I’m exploring the space these materials and textures occupy—flattening three-dimensional items and making them two-dimensional drawings and vice versa,” says Dotson. “But there’s also this idea of appreciating the ‘non-preciousness’—taking these objects that literally we wipe our feet on, and elevating them on the wall as a work of art.”
In recent work, Dotson has continued the red thread of rugs, taking her detailed drawings and embedding them in a multi-layered photographic process. The current series is a set of images which begin with a photograph of a drawing, wallpaper or otherwise that Dotson prints out and layers with Model Magic twists and Sculpey blobs, handmade paper, buttons, paint, more drawings, paper scraps and so on, taking photos and printing them at each stop—over and over flattening three dimensional objects until “it feels right in both two and three dimensions.” The final piece is a single sheet of poster paper.
Referencing photographer Lukas Blaloch—who followed playwright Bertolt Brecht’s line on the importance of exposing the labor involved in art—Dotson says she’s interested in revealing the process behind her images. Some of this labor is revealed in the textural edges captured, and the scratches, shadows, highlights and debris that enters the image and interrupts the veneer of a flat surface. Rather than photographs or photo-documentation, Dotson thinks of the final prints as installation spaces (or two-dimensional installations) and might make several simulacra or copies, rarely working in closed editions.
Stephanie Dotson, Untitled (Buttons, voids), photo and mixed media, 2020
Stephanie Dotson at work in her Santa Barbara studio. Photo by Debra Herrick
“Every work is a space. I’m reacting to the edges and exploring how things layer up from back to front,” she says. “I’m not precious about the work and the materials which is in a lot of ways really practical and freeing. Things can fall apart afterwards and that is fine. I reserve the right for twenty possible outcomes for very similar work.”
Stephanie Dotson’s work has been shown at the Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College; London Taxi Gallery, Athens, Georgia; Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia; Christina Ray Gallery, New York; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles—of which she was a founding member—among other galleries.
•This article was originally published in Lum’s print magazine, 03 • Winter 2021.
