If there is one material that defines artist Summer J. Hart’s creative life, it’s paper.
She makes art from it. She writes poetry on it. Her family heritage stretches back several generations in the paper and logging industry, on the Penobscot River and in the Millinocket mill.
But Hart, a 1993 graduate of Hampden Academy who now splits her time between Maine and upstate New York, didn’t fully realize the meaning of it all until she began writing her book, “Boomhouse.” It’s a collection of poems that comes out on Sept. 12 through 3rd Thing Press, and is inspired by the Penobscot River watershed, the rhythms of Maine’s seasons, her Mi’gmaq heritage and her long family history in the logging industry.
“I dealt with themes like that in my art while I was in school, but I didn’t return to it until more recent years,” she said. “I found myself exploring all these questions about family and nature and Maine. It all seemed to coalesce.”
The themes in “Boomhouse” tie directly to the visual art piece Hart spent the past year working on. “Out in May, Back in October” is a 12-by-8-foot installation of more than 8,000 handmade, hand-dyed paper beads strung together to create a monumental portrait of her grandparents, Robert and Mary Fraser.
Robert came to Maine from Canada to work in the logging industry and ended up in Millinocket to work at the mill. Mary grew up in Restigouche, Quebec — today the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation — and met Robert while he was recruiting Native men to work for the Great Northern Paper Company. The photo of the pair Hart used for the portrait shows them smiling, proudly, together.
Two things had to happen in order to create “Out in May.” Hart had to stop into the Parsonage Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in Searsport, and she had to learn from her uncle, former Bangor Daily News editor in chief Mark Woodward, that the holy grail of paper — tens of thousands of feet of blank newsprint — was possibly sitting, untouched, in a warehouse in the shuttered East Millinocket Mill.
“I loved what they were doing at the Parsonage so much, and I told them I hoped we could collaborate on a show at some point,” said Hart, whose mother, Deborah Jellison, lives in Searsport and is also an artist and the former art teacher at the Mary Snow School in Bangor. “This quickly came together after that.”
First, though, Hart had to go to the East Millinocket mill to see if the fabled paper was real. With the help of former millworkers Chip Bishop and Dick Angotti and former U.S. representative and Millinocket native Mike Michaud, last summer she visited the mill site and was thrilled to discover that not only was the newsprint really there — there was more than she could ever possibly use.
“They were so enthusiastic about this project, and to make this piece of art using paper directly sourced from the kind of mill my grandfather worked in really made all the difference,” she said. “This is the paper that the Bangor Daily News would have been printed on. It’s made from Maine trees. It has a lot of meaning.”
Paper acquired, Hart set up a miniature factory in her studio in order to create the beads that would be strung together to create the portrait of her grandparents. She first tore paper into small strips and soaked it in a solution until it had broken down into a reconstituted pulp. She then put that slurry into a high-powered blender with more paper to create a thick mixture, which she scooped out with a meatball press to shape the beads.
Once dried, she drilled holes in them and then dyed them various shades of gray. After she had made more than 8,000 “meatballs,” she began weaving them into 22 separate sections, using a beading technique learned from her Mi’gmaq aunt and mother.
Finally, after eight months of painstaking, methodical work, in April of this year she began to see her grandparents’ faces appear, as she strung one bead after another.
“When I finally saw their faces, it was incredibly moving,” she said.
“Out in May, Back in October” — a reference to the logging season in Maine’s north woods when lumbermen would go to logging camps in May and come back in October — was on display earlier this summer at the Parsonage Gallery, and will go back on display next year at the State House Gallery in Augusta. It’s accompanied by other art Hart also made from the mill paper, including a series of small abstract paintings — 109 in total, one for each mile of the Penobscot River.
“Boomhouse,” her book of poetry, and “Out in May” are intertwined, and as an interdisciplinary artist, Hart uses many different mediums to explore the ideas that resonate with her. With these two projects, however, it all hits very close to home.
“There are so many aspects to this work — the economic, the environmental, identity, history — and yet it is also deeply personal,” she said. “That’s my Nana up there.”
“Boomhouse” is available via 3rd Thing Press on Sept. 12.