"Green Leaves" Chorlton's Big Green Festival

This site specific project was to create a piece of art work for Chorlton's Big Green Festival (27/3/10) which incorporated the themes of growth, sustainability and re-cycling.
When the group first visited the site, myself and a fellow student spotted the same tree to work with and so we decided to collaborate. Both of us enjoy working manually to create artwork so this was the starting point for our ideas. After considering the themes of the festival we chose to create leaves for the tree by re-cycling materials to make handmade paper. We used materials such as old newspapers, flyers, junk mail, leaves and petals, twigs etc. This was pulped down with water, bound and sized using cornflour and then pressed to make to make paper.
The finished "leaves" were strung to the tree using natural twine. The idea was that visitors to the festival could interact with the work by writing or drawing their hints, tips and ideas on how we can be "green".
Now the festival is over, we have removed the paper from the tree and plan to re-use them in a smaller piece of work or bing them as a book for St. Clement's church to keep.
I enjoyed collaborating on this project as I was able to hear alternative ideas which I may not have otherwise considered. Collaborating also helped with the creation of the work itself as it was very labour intensive! Neither of us had made handmade paper before so it was also interesting to learn a new skill and help eachother.
http://greenchorlton.org.uk/