Art
By Anna Herscher
Story and Community through Handmade Paper and Printmaking
Walt Nygard
Frontline Arts
A
“My throat won’t work. There is so much but I just can’t say it.” Talia Lugacy in the HBO Max movie, This Is Not a War Story, featuring Frontline Arts veterans. rt can tell a story too profound for words.
Frontline Arts opens the doors of its studios in Branchburg, New Jersey, to some folks with big stories to tell. The community there welcomes veterans of all service eras and military branches to come, hang out, and get involved in producing gorgeous handmade paper and prints.
Photos courtesy of Walt Nygard
Veterans participate in a community-based practice of deconstruction, literally chopping up military uniforms, and then reclamation, making paper from the cloth for their own artwork. Anyone can take a seat at one of the large tables and help chop up the uniforms and then do some basic papermaking tasks, so no art experience is required. According to Walt Nygard, a Lead Instructor and Studio Manager, the veterans just like to meet each other, get together, and talk. While Frontline has many donated uniforms that anyone can use, some veterans, in what can only be a significant marker in one’s personal story, bring their own. One can imagine a newly arrived veteran, let’s call him Jack. He might have only the day before uncovered the uniform from a box down in his basement. When Jack lifted it from the box, bits of dirt from half-way around the world fell out. He noticed smears of his own blood. The uniform evoked a story, long unspoken, but always told in his body and mind.
In the deeply symbolic act, which Frontline calls a process of deconstruction, the new arrival tears and then cuts up the uniform. Storytelling and community building begin as new and former participants sit around big tables cutting the uniforms into small squares and talking. According to Nygard, “They’re veterans, they’re talking about relationships, movies, football, their service—stupid stuff that happened, terrible things that happened in the war. We have a place to tell the stories, not only to each other but to themselves. That’s what we’re here for, telling stories.” In the second powerful process, known at Frontline as reclamation, veterans use the cut-up uniforms to create handmade paper in the soft blues, greens, and browns of their former uniforms. From the standpoint that all art speaks of the artist, storytelling continues as they either learn printmaking or use the art supplies available to create images. War and social protest are often the themes, but participants create all sorts of other work besides. The roots of the Frontline Arts practices, says Nygard, go back to a weekend when some people got together at the Green Door Studio, owned by papermaker Drew Matott in Burlington, Vermont, to put on a performance art event. Matott, a veteran, read to the group gathered while someone cut the uniform from his body. Over the weekend, the group made the uniform into paper and created artwork on their handmade paper. Continued on next page 9
