Artist follows paper trail

Newspaper is a wonderfully versatile material for an artist to use - and it's free, Marion Wassenaar says.

Formerly a colour-stripper in newspaper printing, she has had a long connection with the material.

Software now performs the colour-stripping process and, finding herself unemployed, Wassenaar (now 54) came to art school in Dunedin seven years ago. She is completing a MFA and has two exhibitions, ''Carbon Black'', at the Dunedin Gasworks Museum fitting shop and ''Carbon Black3'' at the Dunedin School of Art Gallery.

The fitting shop was an appropriate place to have a show because she was exploring ideas about alternative energy and was turning her newspaper papier mache works into carbon, she said.

Some of her carbonised works are made from original items like seeds, or an apple, which was part of her winning entry in the Evolve Art Award last year. Others have a clay and paper mix rubbed into the material or are actually made of the clay-paper mix, like her boots and a life-sized figure in a gas mask she says represents the now-gone labourers in places like the gasworks or Hillside workshops.

To turn objects into carbon she seals them in a metal container with small holes to allow the gases to escape but excludes oxygen, and heats them for a long time in a fire. It's an ancient method of making charcoal and the resulting objects are fragile, unlike ceramics which are fired to a higher temperature, she said.

''I didn't want anything permanent and I like the fragility of it, and the fact that it can be put back in the soil and the carbon's contained.''

She has also made some small books with drawings of tools found at the gasworks which have comments from the maintenance engineers there and another with extracts from T.S. Eliot's poem, ''The Waste Land''.

She also makes handmade paper from newsprint and a series of reduction linocut prints of the gasworks are included in the exhibition. There is no turning back with a reduction print, she says, because once you have printed one colour you cut away more lino before the next printing, until you are left with just the black you are finishing with.

''The fact there is no turning back speaks to me of the industrial changes that are happening and the environmental concerns.''

---

See it
• ''Carbon Black'' Marion Wassenaar's master of fine arts exhibition is at the Dunedin Gasworks, Braemar St, South Dunedin, on Sunday afternoons from March 24 to April 21. On the 24th she is hosting an afternoon tea and hopes former employees of the gasworks will come and share stories.

• An accompanying show, ''Carbon Black³'', is at the Dunedin School of Art Gallery, Reigo St, from March 18 to March 29.

---