An artist who gives voice to waterways by turning seaweed, sediment, and plants into paper.
Artist Statement
Places are complex, full of changing waterways, botanical life, marginalized histories, built structures, and more, all of which can offer clues to cultures.
How my artwork begins
Each body of work starts with site specific research into hydrologies, land use, ecologies, human histories, and geologies. I explore rivers and watersheds, oceans, mountains, and more. Material engagement is foundational to my practice. Collected, abundant plant and seaweed fibers are processed into paper. Foraged sediment, water, and pressed plants are incorporated into wet paper pulp. Drawings gain a psychological impression and witness poignant evidence of human activity. In the studio, technical innovation invigorates my practice, and I combine papermaking, analog photography, printmaking, gilding, and sculptural techniques. My practice is guided by a regenerative philosophy—where material use and actions benefit all systems holistically.
biracial identity & MIGRATING PLANTS
Identity is intrinsically tied to place, and my personal lineage is a story of uprooting and movement across the globe, a background that pushes me to explore places deeply and through the lens of traveling plants—plants that originate from places far away and arrive a different moments in time. On one side, my grandparents were first-generation immigrants from China to Taiwan, and one parent is a first-generation immigrant from Taiwan to America. On the other side, I can trace ten generations back to European colonizers in New England, including John Eliot. He was a Puritan missionary that translated the Bible into Algonquian, the language of the area’s First Peoples.
I witness waterways through similarly migratory plants as a method biracial self-discovery. It is not a parallel metaphor, but a multi-dimensional web of interconnections that I try to understand about myself, place, and the plants around me. Traveling, abundant plants are seen as morally “bad” and “invasive,” that they don’t belong. At the same time, they are often the ones able to survive stressed sites that have been altered by human disturbance and toxic pollutants, acting as healers. The dominant paradigm of native vs. non-native, “good” and “bad” plants reinforces xenophobia and a war-like attitude against nature and inferior races in pursuit of perfectionism and purism. In reality, there is not one “pure” moment in ecological history. Nature is always changing. Waters move and shift. We are all native to the Earth.
WHAT I CREATE
This broad range of influences coalesce with plant-based paper pulp that I make and use to draw sculptural forms, realize large scale pulp paintings, bind artists’ books, develop textured sheets for cyanotype and metal leaf, and embed river muds and seaweeds. I create public art, large-scale installations, and community-created works that are both inspired by and crafted with specific sites and peoples, to give waterways and their complexities a voice in our culture.
Collaboration between people, plants, and paper gives opportunities for deep communication and healing in a climate-changed world.
Papermaking with July rainwater and roadside Soaptree Yucca at the Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas.
Bio
May Babcock is an ecocentric artist who transforms sediment and displaced plants into handmade paper, revealing the complexities of various waterways. Based in the United States, her practice intersects the fields of hand papermaking, contemporary craft, book arts, ecological art, gardening, public art, community building, sculpture, installation art, printmaking, and analog photography.
Babcock exhibits her artwork widely. This includes the RISD Museum of Art, The National Taiwan Craft Research and Development Institute, The Center for Book Arts, Danforth Art Museum, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Notable public art sites include Brown University, Illinois State Museum, T.F. Green Airport, the Rhode Island State House, and Providence City Hall. Her work has been featured in Art New England, Hand Papermaking, Rhode Island Monthly, the International Association for Great Lakes Research, and Cyanotype: The Blueprint in Contemporary Practice.
May Babcock has taught papermaking at Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has taught workshops at Brown University, Penland School of Crafts, Women's Studio Workshop, and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center.
She has been the artist in residence at National Parks, National Forests, universities, and wilderness areas. Babcock has received grants from New England Foundation for the Arts, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, Barr Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. She is a National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow. Interestingly, Babcock was awarded a Citizen Citation award for environmental education from the Mayor of Providence, Rhode Island.
She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Connecticut with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking and earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
Babcock is the guest editor for the Winter 2023: Ecology and Paper issue of Hand Papermaking magazine. She is also a URI Master Gardener, and a Certified Invasive Plant Manager.
May Babcock is the founder of Paperslurry.com and PAPERSLURRY WEEKLY, the newsletter that helps artists become brilliant papermakers.
I made paper from Oxeye Daisy, a problematic plant in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in Montana, deep in the Rocky Mountains.
For further reading:
Read my lecture for the panel Paper Diaspora: Materiality, Identity, and Place organized by Serena Hocharoen
Take a look at my CV
Read my Master’s Thesis, Latent Landscape
Each body of work in my portfolio has detailed information to explore.
Red seaweeds foraged from Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island for Ebb and Flow II where Megan Singleton and I collaborated to create a public art installation.
Pulping plant fibers by hand, on a rock in the wilderness.