18th May - 23rd June 2009


Fabric of War records personal and collective histories of conflict, translated into paper from uniforms and monuments by US-based Combat Paper Project and Marshall Weber.

Combat Paper Project brings together war veterans, many suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who pulp their uniforms to make paper as the basis for cathartic artworks (www.combatpaper.org). Using traditional hand-papermaking processes veterans cut, cook and beat their uniforms to make pulp, from which sheets of paper are formed using a mould and deckle. The group tours the US holding papermaking workshops that bring together veterans and members of the public. Their work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Harvard and Princeton libraries and the Boston Athenaeum.

Marshall Weber is an artist and curator who founded Booklyn Artists’ Alliance in 1999 (www.booklyn.org). Booklyn is an artist-run, non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York, promoting artists’ books as an art form and educational resource. Marshall Weber’s ongoing Monument project uses rubbing, drawing and collage to create books and drawings reinterpreting texts and images from war memorials around the world. The works commissioned for Fabric of War form part of this series and were executed at the church of St. Clement Danes on the Strand.

Fabric of War is the first exhibition of Combat Paper Project’s work outside the US and will travel to Phoenix Brighton and the Birnam Institute, Scotland. It will be accompanied by a workshop tour of the UK in June during which the group will travel with a portable papermaking studio.