Paper Buck and Alpesh Patel

Alpesh Patel: To start us out, please provide a quick summary (a few sentences) of your project.

Paper Buck: Windmill Island: A Thinking Place on the Delaware is a fourteen-foot floating windmill sculpture that draws inspiration from the historic Windmill Island, which was once a prominent feature of the city center of Philadelphia from the time of settlement, until it was removed in 1890. I became aware of the island’s history when I came across a drawing made by an unknown artist in 1802, depicting the city of Philadelphia in 1702. A windmill in the image’s foreground, floating in the river, piqued my interest. 

The sculpture has a twelve-by-twelve foot base with eight 50-gallon barrels for flotation. The central body of the structure is an eight-foot hexagon with an asymmetric domelike cap that resembles the traditional “smock” shape used in Dutch colonial-era windmills. The sails are about four feet long. This design was a common architectural style across Lenapehoking, which was claimed as “New Netherland” before it came under British control. 

There is also a zine that includes an essay about the project, and an interview with Adam Waterbear DePaul, one of the four chiefs of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania and the tribe’s Director of Education. I am still working on the zine. It will be available when we launch the windmill on the river in summer 2024. 

AP: What questions initially drove your research? How and why did they change? What surprised you? 

PB: I was interested in the historical windmill structure and the ways it might function as a mnemonic device to think into less-circulated narratives of the city’s history. One of the core questions I’ve sought to research as I developed the project is: how have colonization and settlement impacted the life of the river, and its future? 

The life of the river itself implies the experiences of every living being in the entire watershed. We get our drinking water from the river. We get our livelihood and, collectively, our economy from the river. This place is sculpted by the river. It is why we are here. We can’t really function without it — never could. Cannot. We experience the effects of the ways we have chosen to manage its structure and composition. The river is inside us. We consume it. It builds and maintains us. All that history comes with the river.

The windmill is a subaltern or subterranean portal into Philadelphia’s cultural and ecological history and present. I initially came across the drawing of Windmill Island in a post on an archeological forum, while researching indigenous village sites in the city. There are at least seventeen that are well documented, including five in the central peninsula area that forms the city’s core. I think it is very important not just to remember, but to live in recognition, or even exclamation, that Philadelphia is still Lenapehoking. We do live, quite literally, within occupied Lenape territories today. That began before the city was founded, and it has never ended — despite our amnesia.

In my practice, I am interested in how lesser-known histories remain physically embedded in the cultural materiality of place today. I am one of those history geeks who truly believes that memory changes the future. So, I am excavating memory in a way, hoping to put it to use. The windmill is a place for reflecting on our relationship to the river, ourselves, and each other. It is a social archive, in a sense.

AP: I know you have a very research-intensive practice — not only do you think through the physical making of the artwork, but you also dig into archives and textual documents. Can you describe this part of your process?

PB: Yes, I am both a maker and a researcher. I like to dig into physical archives and places. I am interested in how the knowledge that might exist in archives — or be acutely missing from them, in many cases — directly impacts the ideas circulating in culture and politics today. I like to use the specificity of place to draw divergent or intersecting perspectives into a single conversation. The windmill integrates the city and region’s social, political, and ecological histories. To research them, I must consult river ecologists, indigenous leaders, historians, archivists, among others. That type of breadth is very exciting to me. I want to seek varied perspectives and filter those different sets of knowledge into a unique creative narrative. The windmill is as much a sculpture as it is a placeholder for a more abstract and conceptual process — an evolving narrative-formation.

AP: I enjoyed what you said earlier — that “memory changes the future” and that you are “excavating memory in a way, hoping to put it to use.” You recently made an artwork Forest as Kiln (2023), specifically for an exhibition I organized at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn. One of the things I most enjoy about this work is that it gestures not only towards the past and present of an area of the Housatonic River — near where you grew up, and the site of a former iron furnace — but also towards a more hopeful future, represented by the trillium plant that you discovered thriving there despite the harmful environmental effects of industrialization and settler colonialism. This work, in part, emerged through our conversations about the project you were doing at RAIR. Can you tell us more about the connection between your work at RAIR and Forest as Kiln? You are planning to return the slag and minerals embedded in the work’s wax back to the site from which you sourced them, right?

PB: Yes, there are certainly connections between the works. A former professor of mine once counseled me to “be with the inquiry” in my research process within a place. I was trying to prefigure the outcomes. I was trying to package the work before I had made it. This is to say: I am interested in learning, within specific places, how lesser-known histories continue to reside materially. The materialities I witness, view, or excavate help to generate and recall memory, which, as I have stated — can change the future. The process of being with a place; traversing, noticing, seeing and communicating with a place — that is really the work itself. It is the subject of the work. If there is an art object or an essay that I am able to make and share as a result, that is actually the second stage of making the work. What the work references is not just the place itself, but my particular exchange with it, and experience of it.

In this way, my practice aims towards emergent pedagogies. I used to be a preschool teacher and “emergent pedagogy” is a teaching practice I encountered within early childhood education. The idea is that each child is unique. The learning journey can’t be entirely standardized. When considering how best to nurture learning, the educator’s role is to sympathetically perceive what emerges from the child. I find emergent pedagogy, which is a vast set of tools beyond what I have discussed, to be incredibly innovative thinking that is relevant for every age. I often wish more adults would go back to preschool — but that’s another topic.

I bring up emergent pedagogy because it is part of what connects the two works. It takes being in a place, and the archival and social research I do in relation, to get an idea of what might be a compelling concept or form to communicate through. Forest as Kiln is a sculpture that is made of paraffin wax, multicolored slag, charcoal residues, bricks of limestone, and raw iron ore. The paraffin is shaped into a column that may read as an enlarged candle. The other materials were all collected from the former site of the Cornwall Bridge Iron Furnace in Cornwall, Connecticut, where I grew up. I initially collected these raw materials for an exhibition at the town’s historical society, for a section geared towards kids, so they could touch and see the varied materials that were extracted from the earth in order to power the historic furnaces. When the exhibition at UrbanGlass came up, and there was an invitation to work with glass, my mind went right to the slag. 

As part of that exhibition, I had also driven the length of the Housatonic River, from Milford Point on the Long Island Sound, to Dalton, Massachusetts, just outside Pittsfield. The headwaters of that 150-mile river are essentially a marsh, called Muddy Pond. It is the sadness of every person who lives along the Housatonic River — hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people — that this marsh was polluted in the midtwentieth century by General Electric, who formerly operated an electrical transformer recycling facility. General Electric dumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) into the river before PCBs were outlawed in 1979. You cannot eat the fish or wildlife in the Housatonic anymore. Swimming does happen in some spots, but the truth is, people probably shouldn’t be swimming in there very often. This is actually a very contentious issue in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. We are approaching fifty years since the plant shut down, and the people of these areas are still fighting for a comprehensive attempt to clean up the river — only the first two miles were ever remediated. 

It might seem like I’m going off topic, but what’s interesting is, in fact, all this detail is part of what connects the two projects. The same exact thing happened at RAIR! Just behind the construction and demolition recycling facility that RAIR is housed within, there is a Superfund site. It wasn’t General Electric in this case, but it was another electrical transformer recycling facility that dumped PCBs into the Delaware River — which, as a result, is also forever polluted. 

Back to Forest as Kiln. I found it fascinating that the contemporary experience of the landscape I grew up in, which is of course a product of the ecological and social history of the place, is so deeply impacted by the objects I was collecting at the site. The total clearcutting that took place in what is now a densely forested area, determined so much about how this forest grew back — what never grew back, and what became predominant. All of the materials were created by the earth itself, on this location: The raw ore is such a gorgeous tone of red. I love red iron oxide, and already had an affection for the color and texture. I use it to trace my drawings onto copper plates for etching. The charcoal bits, residue from the era when the land was cyclically clearcut, are pieces of the bodies of the ancestors of the trees around the site. The limestone, quarried nearby, is the subsurface foundation of the forest. These elements were isolated as lime, ore, charcoal, and put in a kiln — but really, they’re the holistically conceived layers of the forest, all being tumbled into a kiln and set alight. Forest into the kiln. 

As you mentioned, on one of the days I was collecting materials at the site, I came across a flowering trillium. Trillium is rare to see. It really only survives where there is very little human traffic, in mature isolated forests. Even then, if you hike all day and see more than one, it’s a special treat. That day, I found one right inside the foundations of the old foundry. This was so meaningful to me, because it seemed to suggest that even at ground zero of historic extraction, the return of signature indicator species was underway. The site has been in regrowth for 100 years, but relatively speaking, that’s not so terribly long.

The candlesque reference was, for me, a nod to the lifecycles I was witnessing and interacting with. I light candles to set intentions, to pray, to remember, to honor, or to create light. I think these are relatively common uses. Being at that site involved all of those purposes. I did not add a wick; I was more interested in the concept of a candle than the thing itself. 

And last, yes, I have returned all the slag and ore I did not use for the candle to the site of the furnace. When the exhibit comes down in New York, I may deconstruct the piece and do the same. I’m contemplating returning it whole, as a sculpture with the wax. I guess technically, I would need to ask someone for permission — that might be an interesting process to finish the piece with. I’ll have to see, when that time comes. 

AP: I also loved what you said: “The river is inside us. We consume it. It builds and maintains us. All that history comes with the river.” It’s poetic. Can you expand on this? How does language fit into your overall practice, specifically in relation to your work at RAIR? What will the zine bring to this project? Is this where writing comes in?

PB: There is so much I have to say about the materials, archives, and places I am exploring in my work. Oftentimes, it doesn’t all fit into the visual artwork. To accompany my visual work with text helps me feel like I have given what I can give. Some of that conception of giving is personal: I need to feel like I have done the material and the journey justice. Some of it is archive-junkie minded: in my work in archives, I’m very aware how much gets omitted from next-generation memory because it wasn’t considered important, or no one took the time. The most compelling moments of archival research are when you find off-handed footnotes referencing something no one considered worth dedicating space to — sometimes these are exactly what you are looking for, and all you end up having to work with. I am aware that in all of history, relatively few people have paid attention to the archives of this little ruin in an isolated forest. I am also aware that someday, others will. I hope my sculpture, and any writing about it that I do, will be there as a companion to the next person who geeks out on the site, for their own reasons. I really love thinking about archivists and archives in this way. 

With the zine for Windmill Island, yes, I will write a short essay about the project and all the archives, interactions, and lessons I came across in the process. I will also publish an interview I did with Adam Waterbear DePaul, who is the Storykeeper for the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, and its Director of Education. Adam is an incredibly warm and tenderhearted individual who is very enthusiastic about sharing Lenape history with other Lenape people, indigenous communities, and nonnative publics. I have been so impressed by his candor. He is able to share hard truths with a loving heart, to broad audiences, in a way that welcomes all people to join a process of supporting Lenape sovereignty. 

For me, the project uses the memory of Windmill Island as a way to reimagine how we think about the past, present, and future of both the Delaware River, which you could also refer to as the Lenape Sipu, and Philadelphia, which is within Lenapehoking. 

The interview with Adam is about Lenape relationships to the river, past and present, as well as their state recognition campaign, which I strongly support. Pennsylvania is one of a small handful of US states that do not recognize any indigenous peoples, nor contain any reservations. I think that needs to change. I think it is in everyone’s best interest for indigenous peoples to have sovereignty over their own people and homelands. Part of why the river is polluted is because we have denied the Lenape their sovereignty, which includes their ability to exercise their self-determined commitments to protecting the health of the river. That’s bad for all of us.

In general, I do tend to use my writing to help me integrate perspectives I gain in the research process, from folks I collaborate with, or interview. To me, it’s intellectually thrilling to have the opportunity to ask folks with different types of knowledge about the same space or context. My work is to weave those different perspectives into a narrative that I am able to share. I am really grateful that Adam’s perspectives on the history, present, and future of the river are able to become a part of how this artwork gets read. 

AP: We met during the pandemic, through a series of online workshops I organized as part of a residency with the Chautauqua School of Art. I remember worrying that Zoom would flatten the experience for you and the other participants. Still, it seemed to bring us closer together, because of our sudden forced isolation. Being at RAIR in-person, with those who work at the recycling plant and those who were part of the larger residency, seems like another very special community. What have the culture and ecosystem of RAIR brought to your engagement with this work?

PB: I’m happy you asked this question. I have so many wonderful things to say about RAIR and the folks who compose it. I am newer to Philadelphia, and before my residency at RAIR, I did not yet have a community here. By the end of the residency, I had fallen in love with the city and felt a strong sense of community. It’s truly incredible that the residency, and the windmill project, accomplished so much for me, personally. 

RAIR is a very personable environment — nobody checks themselves at the door before work, and you bring your whole person to the studio. I began deep, important friendships at RAIR. I think friendship fosters the best art. It’s maybe an undersung aspect of intellectual production. How many important art movements began as a result of friendships? That would be a fun art history question!

On a more strictly practical level, I will say: this was my first large-scale sculptural project. Billy Dufala, the founder and Creative Director at RAIR, knew a lot more about building materials and sculptural construction than I did. RAIR is a residency that offers a lot of support — I was not in there building this thing on my own! I brought the idea, the critical concepts, the form and general structure. Billy and Izzy Korostoff, who was the Yard Liaison at the time, would then get to work, helping me draft practical manifestations of these ideas. By that, I mean working out the math and the angles down to the precise sixteenth-of-an-inch calculation. I made a small-scale model and Izzy drafted it up to scale. We were working with recycled materials, so we couldn’t just go to the store and buy the parts we needed — we had to go out to the yard and find them. That meant a lot of creative substitutions: we would find something that might work, and then rework the plans based on that part. This was not a fast way of working, but it was highly collaborative, and very fun for me. I am usually a bit more solo in my projects, and this blasted me into a different mode of working. Sometimes I would come up with an idea for how to construct a certain part of the structure, and I would go to Billy or Izzy for their feedback. Often, they suggested an entirely different approach. I learned to be a lot more willing to scrap my own ideas and try a different way. I’m happy I became comfortable doing so — I learned so much as a result.