Georgina Wilson, Water/marked
One afternoon during the Paper in Motion symposium at the Arnamagnæan Institute, Copenhagen, our group of paper conservators, literary scholars, archivists, and digital humanists attempted to twist and clip small pieces of wire onto a mould to make a watermark. Having abandoned several more ambitious designs, I settled on a watermark in the shape of a boat: a half-moon shaped base, topped with a single sail. The wobbly result only vaguely captured some essence of boat-ness, but, as my freshly-made sheet of paper dried on a sheet of blue felt, I began to dwell on the aquatic connections between watermarks and the act of papermaking. It was by generating these interdisciplinary modes of thinking – in this case, moving between the material realities of papermaking, and the creative impulses of my own literary training – that the Paper in Motion workshop formed new connections between its participants’ differing areas of research. Figure 1 Boat, watermark (Wilson, 2022) Where did the word watermark come from? In its first uses, a ‘water mark’ had nothing to do with paper at all, and [...]
