Melissa Potter: Invisible Labors: Prairie Carbon Sequestering and Papermaking

Terrain Biennial

October 2 - November 15, 2021

Join us for a paper-making event on Saturday, November 13, 2021, 1 - 4pm.

Invisible Labors: Prairie Carbon Sequestering and Papermaking is a curated garden project in the 500 square foot front yard of boundary, curated by Susannah Papish for the Terrain Biennial, exploring the underground carbon remediation activity of prairie plants and the process of hand papermaking with these plants during the fall/winter season.

Commercial papermaking requires a vast system of labor (and ecologically damaging processes), which through industrialization is hidden to the average consumer. Due to industrial farming and commercial industries like papermaking, prairie grasslands are now considered North America's most endangered ecosystem. Inspired by the Wages for Housework movement in the 70s which coined the term, invisible labor, the Invisible Labors garden engages the public with thematic signage, educational materials, and public events to encourage alternative histories of and uses for these plants and processes.

In the Summer and Fall of 2021, the garden will be planted with live plants , as well as seeded with prairie perennials usable for hand papermaking, which can take up to three years to be visible above ground as plants.

Melissa Hilliard Potter is a feminist interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited in numerous venues including White Columns, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, to name a few. Her films have been screened at international film festivals, such as the Cinneffable and the Reeling International LGBT Film Festival. 

Potter has been the recipient of three Fulbright Scholar grants, as well as funding from CEC ArtsLink, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and Soros Fund for Arts and Culture, all of which enabled her to build two papermaking studios at university art departments in Serbia and Bosnia & Hercegovina. In addition, she  collaborated with women felt artisans and activists from Georgia through her project, “Craft Power,” with Miriam Schaer. 

Melissa developed research, documentary and advocacy projects with ethnographers and intangible heritage experts to protect, interpret and archive endangered women’s handicrafts and social customs. In Chicago, this work extends to the history of the Hull-House arts and crafts movement and its contemporary influence in crafts media including hand papermaking and artists’ books.

As a curator, Potter’s exhibitions include “Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art” with Jessica Cochran and “Revolution at Point Zero: Feminist Social Practice” with Neysa Page Lieberman. Her curatorial and recent hand papermaking projects, including “Seeds InService” with Maggie Puckett, have been funded by the Crafts Research Fund, Clinton Hill Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation & Jane M. Saks, and the MAKER Grant.

A prolific writer, her critical essays have been printed in BOMB, Art Papers, Flash Art, Metropolis M, Hand Papermaking, and AfterImage among others. 

Potter is a Professor at Columbia College Chicago and collaborates with artists in the medium of hand papermaking. She travels throughout the country teaching, lecturing, and conducting interviews. 

Melissa lives and works in Chicago, IL. 

“Terrain Biennial, initiative of Terrain Exhibitions, was founded in 2013 by artist Sabina Ott. The biennial was created on a volunteer basis in the spirit of community building through free and accessible public art installations and events staged in residential neighborhoods across the U.S. and worldwide.

This act of radical decentralization takes art from privileged urban centers and brings it into everyday spaces where it is most needed and least expected: yards, front steps, windows, porches, and roofs. The 2021 Terrain Biennial aims to find spaces of joy and community essential for collective healing in these times of isolation, public reckonings, and mourning. Sharing much of the same sentiment as yearbook signatures and pen pal letters, we bring you K.I.T. (keep in touch)...”