Paper Making c. 1935 - 1943

Charles Reed Gardner made this print called ‘Paper Making’ and I imagine him bent over the plate, scratching at it with a needle to create all these tiny hatched lines. The whole scene is built from these marks, describing this huge, hulking machine and the poor guy operating it. The tonality of the print is very dark, but bright where the paper rolls are. You get the sense that Gardner knew how to make an image through labour-intensive actions. It’s like he’s describing labour through labour. He uses a very simple language, but I can really feel the weight of the machine. Like all artists, he was probably looking at other artists - maybe some of the social realists of the time - and thinking about how he could portray something like this. Artists are always in dialogue, riffing off each other. And that conversation continues, with us looking at this print today, thinking about industry, labour, and the life of the artist who made it.