Liz Hunt

rethinKing materialS: John Stowe in Conversation with liz hunt

John and I met via WebEx to discuss his thesis explorations into substantial building materials with papermaking techniques using wild-harvested plants from the local area and his home in Florida. He has been collecting Sable Palm and Stiltgrass, breaking the fibers down into pulp to cast in molds and reform into siding. John is completing his second year as an MFA candidate in printmaking at SUNY New Paltz.

Liz Hunt: We both came back to school in our early thirties. Do you find that that has given you a different perspective returning to school now?

John Stowe: They say the thirties are the new twenties. There is something to taking time off between the undergraduate and graduate level, coming into that next degree with a different mindset.

LH: It’s like you are excited to go back.

JS: The gratitude you have being in that space and doing what you are doing is greater. You feel it more – you want to be there. When you are working in the real world, you’re thinking that being in the studio is so much cooler than working nine to five. I was doing contract work, construction, full time, seven days a week. Working for myself, dealing with clients, doing the entire job from start to finish, sacrificing personal time to get more and more work, with the goal to eventually reach a place where you don’t need to work so hard.

I was kind of happy when I was able to stop doing that. Now the energy I was putting into that, I’m able to put into my art practice. And that’s hard to teach, and it’s one of those extra things you bring with you. You know what you are capable of, and that work ethic you bring to the studio is different.

LH: My impression of you is that you fit well into the culture of New Paltz. It feels like a community where everyone wants to be outside and do things together and is in a great location.

JS: Yeah, but COVID threw a wrench into all of that. I’ve spent the majority of my time here on my own. I can imagine that if I were living in the town of New Paltz, this year would have been different for me. I wouldn’t have felt so fulfilled in my graduate studies. I wouldn’t have been able to cook fiber in a four-foot pit in my backyard. The stars aligned.

LH: Do you feel that the location of your graduate program at New Paltz, here in New York State, framed your thesis?

JS: Growing up in Florida, the ecosystems are different – the pine scrub, the oaks, and palmettos. Wild Florida looks very different from wild New York. Everything was so new; my eyes were wide open. I saw many things I wanted to talk about, like soil degradation and nutrient pollutants getting into the waterways. As my work developed, I was making prints and drawings of potential solutions. How could we reimagine infrastructure or record that these things are happening so that the pathways became visible to us?

I got to a point in the fall where I just wanted to move away from speculative solutions and try to create something that could be a physical solution. A manifestation of it in the real world, moving beyond print into three-dimensional reality.

LH: Was there a reason your focus landed on home structures and building materials?

JS: Maybe it ties to where I moved from; Jacksonville is one of the largest cities spatially in the United States. The urban sprawl is noticeable. Large areas of land are clear-cut for townhomes or apartment complexes. I thought about the residential buildings—how we build our homes, there is

so much room for improvement. There they are trying to control the land – to keep things out. Here in New Paltz, there is a blurry edge. We are in the best-case scenario where we can change that thinking. So close to the preserves, the Catskills, we are on the edge where those boundaries can start moving into more suburban areas.

I hate saying this is the solution. I like to remind myself that environmental issues are so complex. The answers to specific problems are going to look very different depending on where you live. The stiltgrass is a particular problem to New Paltz. Let’s start by using this first, and if it doesn’t work, let’s move onto the next thing instead of using trees. Trees are living organisms that take longer to grow than I’ve been alive, and then they are just cut down to be turned into lumber. Why not use other plants that grow faster for similar purposes?

LH: So instead of using standard materials for home building, you are looking at what resources are local and plentiful around you and exploring what you can do with them – Japanese stiltgrass here in New York and Sabal Palm in Florida?

JS: The potential is great for many different things. I’ve been looking at Shigeru Ban’s work building architectural structures using recycled cardboard tubes. His load-bearing structures are built from paper fiber, and I’m only using fiber as a surface application. It’s interesting to see people being so skeptical of this when humans have such a long history of using plants to create shelter. It’s wild to think that people believe this won’t work – it has been working. It’s only been decided over the past hundred years or so that there is a set range of materials you can choose from in commercial homebuilding. They are convenient and easy; the modes of production are already in place, and to try anything else is to go against the system. LH: In looking for a more sustainable solution for building materials, what got you to explore using sabal palm, stiltgrass, and papermaking techniques to create the siding boards?

JS: The underlying thing I’m most interested in is my connection to the land. It’s something I’ve enjoyed most since I’ve been here and something I would hope to communicate if I continue doing this work. To keep being out in the field, understanding the relationships between particular organisms, specifically plants. It’s been great living where I live – I can spend so much time outside. I can easily observe what is happening, see how plants move around, how they propagate, where the seeds are moving, and understand the system and forces at work that move these things around. They are not stationary, not stagnant.

Invasive species like stiltgrass that came from overseas have negative effects on biodiversity. But still, it’s just a plant, that’s good at what it does, quickly propagating and spreading itself. The stiltgrass grows quickly, tall and fast. In the winter, it falls over and forms a blanket, and it does this at the same time it is seeding. It creates a mat that blocks the sun; everything underneath it dies. I think we are too quick to hate it for that. Instead, I’m making something positive from stiltgrass, using its rapid growth as a way to transform it into building materials.

I’ve come to an understanding where papermaking is a piece of ecological knowledge. We can find these processes in nature, all you need is water and time. People in the past have harnessed that process. It’s a process of decomposition— breaking down the lignin in the fiber and reforming it. If you look at the grand scale of time, papermaking is a moment on that timeline where we pause that decay. In the grand scheme of things, everything is going to fall apart eventually

and decompose. I’m pausing the plant fiber at that point to form these boards.

It’s been great to see that happening in nature. Being outside has informed my understanding of the ecosystems that I’m living in. As someone who is not an ecologist—I’ve taken a few classes, but it’s far from a deep scientific understanding of biology and botany—it’s sort of like, I’m hoping that if I pay attention, listen closely enough, look closely enough, I can start learning these things. Then supplement that with my own research to inform myself and understand the processes and systems at work in nature. If people realized that if they go out and spend some time in nature, they could also learn and apply those lessons to something.

LH: Your talk about observing and learning from nature is similar to renaissance naturalists—going out and observing the whole system rather than an isolated part of it in a lab. You are seeing the complete picture and looking at nature as a community.

JS: That’s what’s so great about being an artist. I’m not beholden to the lab and data necessarily. Many ecologists will tell you the best part of their job is the time they spend in the field. That’s what it’s about. The scientific conclusions you get from the research are the life’s work of many of them. As far as the balance of time spent in the lab vs. outside—I don’t have to do that. I get to make up whatever comes up in this crazy head of mine.

I have more flexibility to apply the knowledge in unscientific ways—I have the freedom to dream up crazy applications that may be totally outside of scientific goals. I’m making siding from plant materials!

In the end, I’m making an art object—I’m not in the business of making siding. I don’t plan on starting a company and make a living on it. I’m more interested in seeing if we can have a closer relationship with other organisms around us. I am reestablishing my connection to the land.

What can I do to make my relationship with the land more sustainable? A part that drives me that sends me outside is that I can do more than current institutional methods to promote change. I am making a personal choice to find other alternatives in my artwork. At the moment, I’m just scratching the surface. I’m making very literal connections to building materials right now. I needed to add visual components like vapor barrier and framing timber to have my artwork seen as building materials and structures. To create the visual language of the components of a house, you can live within. However, in the future, I won’t need to add those extra visual elements. This is just a step I have to do, especially seeing so much skepticism of using plants as building materials. It’s so silly.

It makes me think there is a sort of a myth in the American psyche, like the story of the three little pigs—homes of straw, sticks, and brick. In the story, we tell it as if we are the pigs and we need to make a home that will withstand the big bad wolf. But, in that story, we are the big bad wolf—there is nothing out there to eat us. Top of the food chain, do we need homes that last so long? ... Other than the weather anyway—I am from Florida, after all.

Sabal Palm Lap Siding Sabal palm, vapor barrier, wood, 36 x 96” in.