A Conversation with a Paper Maker

The studio is in a converted outbuilding on a hill above a small valley in Powys. There is no mobile signal. The first thing Siân Roberts shows me is not the paper but the water.

The water question

“The water here is soft,” she says, filling a white enamel jug from an outside tap. “That matters. Minerals in water affect how the fibres bond. Hard water produces stiffer sheets. Soft water produces something more supple.”

She has been making paper in this location for nineteen years. Before that she learned the craft from a Japanese master papermaker in Echizen, a region of Japan where washi production has continued for more than a millennium. She brought the Japanese methods back to Wales and adapted them to local materials and conditions.

“The paper I make here is not washi,” she says firmly. “It is informed by washi. That is a different thing.”

The process

Hand papermaking begins with fibre preparation. Roberts works primarily with kozo - the bark of the paper mulberry tree - supplemented by flax, hemp, and occasionally materials found locally. The fibres are cooked in soda ash to remove non-cellulosic matter, washed, beaten, and mixed with water in a vat to create the pulp suspension from which sheets are formed.

The mould - a wooden frame strung with fine mesh - is dipped into the vat and lifted horizontally, carrying a thin layer of fibre suspended in water. The sheet forms as water drains through the mesh, leaving the fibres bonded by hydrogen bonds. What Roberts does with the mould in that lifting moment - the angle, the shake, the speed of withdrawal - determines the character of the sheet.

“That is the part that takes years to learn,” she says. “Everything else you can understand from a book.”

Light and surface

The sheets are couched - transferred from the mould to a damp felt - stacked, pressed, and hung to dry. The drying environment affects the final surface: paper dried in a breeze acquires a slight cockle; paper dried against a flat board is smooth. Roberts generally dries her sheets hanging free, which produces a surface she describes as responsive.

“Responsive means it catches light differently depending on the angle. It is not flat in the way that machine-made paper is flat. There is a slight texture that you may not see but you feel when you write on it.”

She hands me a sheet. It is cream-white, slightly rough at the edges where the deckle was. Holding it to the window, I can see the laid lines of the mould visible in the texture, a watermark that is not a design but a structural record of how the paper was made.

Who buys it

Roberts’s clients are primarily letter writers, calligraphers, and printmakers. A small number of artists use her sheets for works that will eventually enter collections, where the choice of paper is considered part of the work’s meaning. She has made commission sheets for a Japanese calligrapher, an American printmaker, and a Norwegian bookbinder who uses the paper for endpapers in handmade books.

She does not sell online. Clients contact her by email, and most come to the studio at least once before placing a substantial order. “The paper has to be right for what they are doing,” she says. “I cannot know that without understanding their work. A website cannot do that.”

What holds it together

The paper trade has changed around Roberts’s practice without disturbing it much. Machine-made paper has become cheaper and more varied. Digital communication has reduced the volume of correspondence that uses fine paper. The market for handmade paper, she says, has if anything grown - as machine production has converged toward uniformity, the appetite for material specificity has increased.

“The people who care, care more now,” she says. “There are fewer of them, but they are more committed. That is a sustainable situation.”

She refills my jug from the tap. The water, I now understand, is part of the product. The hill, the valley, the soft Welsh rainfall are all present in the sheet that will eventually dry on her line. This is locality in the most literal sense - the paper could not be made anywhere else.