John Babcock lives and works at his studio near Santa Cruz, California, where he creates works using primarily paper as his medium. His work has been shown in over thirty major art museums in the United States and Europe. Notable exhibitions include Craft Today, USA, organized by the American Craft Museum in New York, which traveled through Europe and Poetry of the Physical, shown at the American Craft Museum and traveled throughout the US; The Artful Object: Recent American Craft at the Fort Wayne Art Museum; and The Cutting Edge: New Directions in Hand Made Paper, at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art. Most recently, his work was included in Contemporary Crafts at the Mesa Art Museum and the Shanghai Paper Art Biennale in Shanghai, China.
In addition to exhibiting his work, John has lectured and conducted workshops throughout the United States and internationally, including sessions at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio, Texas; the University of Wisconsin; the University of Hawaii; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; the Maharaja Sayajirao University in India; the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including The Museum of Art and Design in New York City.
Statement
For centuries, humankind has developed and used paper as an essential matrix for communicating ideas. I want my work to reflect this heritage. I tend to tell stories with my work, considering the emotional response the colored paper carries for both the viewer and me.
When I first worked with paper pulp as a medium, I worked horizontally, forming a thin slab of pulp. Like a topographical map, my response was to mark the surface, tearing and pushing around the wet, viscous, fibrous pulp. I now work with highly pigmented pulps and consider all my works as experiments from my “color kitchen.” I am constantly learning from the pulp. I pour, cast, inlay, and collage the various pigmented pulps separately made cotton, kozo, and abaca fibers on large surfaces. Each type of fiber reflects light differently when dry. This fiber manipulation adds a dynamic quality to the work, creating a dynamic within the piece, with sometimes disappearing images.
Symbols, pictographs, and the myriad of ways humans make marks are of interest to me. I use specific characters to activate space. For instance, in the abstract, I will use the triangle, the delta, to represent the village or a family. These marks in many works symbolize a document, a recording of time and place, of information. To begin a new piece, I start with a color palette that sets an emotional tone for the work. I then work on what kind of gestural imagery can fit my story. I allow the medium to speak to me, and I respond.
