What's more ordinary than paper?

Words & Images by Maël Sébille and Lola Delabays

Magazine | Issue 03

What could be more beautiful than handmade plant paper sheets?

I encounter beauty in the ordinary every day.

Every day, with my papermaker friends Iwan and Gani, we create sheets straight from the cellulose of the plants surrounding us in South Lombok, Indonesia. The most common way to start is to pick and then cook these plants, as one would cook a good meal: we take out the big pots, then we make a wood fire. This process becomes extraordinary as we attempt to extract pure cellulose from these plants smoothly and ecologically to finally transform them into paper. An easy, common approach would consist of producing the paper mechanically to display and sell it. But magic comes in as we let the nature of Lombok do its work; it is its plants, its water, its sun, and its wind that sculpt each of our papers, allowing a landscape to be revealed from the inside - organic and sensory.

The beauty of our profession is that we take time: the time to understand the plants, to form each sheet by hand, fingers in the water to guide the fibers - one of the most meditative moments there is, and to plant beautiful intentions that we hope to continue beyond the workshop. Having a piece of paper in our hands is an experience that all of us have already experienced, but exploring it as you would go on an adventure, by looking at it very closely, by touching it, by smelling it, and above all, by looking at it through transparency, is precious. This is where its whole story is revealed. Plants we encounter daily without a second look, everyday paper that we crumple, become a real artisan object serving everyday life, a celebration of nature and time.

What if the art of detail, the art of the moment, was not written but only lived almost every day by making paper with people and nature that we love?