At his studio in rural Normandy, Parme Baratier turns plants into paper, printing each species’ image onto the sheets its fibres have formed. That’s when he’s not gardening or pointing a camera, etching or making inks…
Behind tall barn doors on a sleepy street in a Normandy village is the multiverse of the French polymath Parme Baratier – a paper maker, gardener, nature printer, engraver, photographer, historian, textile connoisseur and artist. ‘For the first time in my life I can do all stages of my work in the same place. It has been my dream,’ he says. ‘At last I can bring everything I need straight from outside.’
The walled gardens truncated by the house and the buildings around their cloistered spaces give Parme habitats to cultivate the living plants he transforms into paper. It is an alchemical practice, whose final flourish involves printing the image of the plant onto the very paper their fibres have yielded – from traditional paper plants such as boehmeria and broussonetia, to everything between Asteraceae and Zingiberaceae, anemone and iris, dandelion and daylily, macleaya and mammillaria, phormium and yucca. More than 130 species to date.
As well as fou de papier, Parme is, unsurprisingly, mad about plants. There are plants in pots and beds, in cracks in the paving, pouring over gravel; plants like characters peer out from behind windows. Tender plants, hardy plants, cacti and citrus. ‘Every one has its own personality and its own timbre, even its own colour,’ Parme says, adding that ‘Rodgersia makes a kind of dark red paper’. Many of them have a link to his childhood homes in Aix-en-Provence and the Languedoc, where his passion for growing was encouraged by his agronomist father and plant-collector mother. The fibres of these heirloom species, which have followed Parme around during his peripatetic life until he settled into this home a decade ago, wait in neatly labelled bags.
Facing you as you enter his enclave of artistic disciplines is the long two-storey house with its unmistakably French shutters and roof tiles. In this domestic setting, precious books and textiles, and indigo and bark-cloth hangings gathered from all over the world, are grouped with seed heads and objets trouvés. A similar vibe can be found in the smaller ‘printing’ house across the courtyard. Downstairs lies a laboratory where Parme mixes his own inks and photographic emulsions.
Copper sheets for etching are joined by less conventional plates. ‘I can even use a banana leaf as a plate if I am printing on banana paper. I have my own system of either making contact prints, photogravure or nature prints, always to exactly the same size of paper.’ His 30-year-old archive of handmade papers upstairs is like a room of Egyptian scrolls, some the large postcard size of his recent books, others sheets up to four metres square. In a sewing room, books are bound and paper sculptures made, while meticulously marked flea-market storage is filled with every creative necessity, from scissors to scalpels. Upstairs, rooms are kept warm and dry; downstairs can get messy.
Nowhere more than in the vast barn that cuts obliquely into the courtyard. This is home to Parme, the inventor and engineer; it houses a fibre factory where kilos of plant material grown in the garden transmogrify into the silkiest pulps that become sheets of many-textured hues. When the mixing machine he built is churning at 300 rpm, and the aromas enter from his outdoor macerating and cooking courtyard, this space shudders with noise and dynamic experimentation.
Stacks of his plant galettes – fibres in an interim stage the size and shape of a giant pizza – are dated, named and stored before being made into paper. Every day starts for Parme in the garden, accompanied by coffee, his cat and two pairs of tame blackbirds. His mood or an upcoming exhibition will determine how long he potters and which studio space he crosses the courtyard to enter. Will it be a day of sloshing and mashing, checking the pH of his boiling and fermenting cauldrons or of conjuring poetic pairings of words that become the titles of his work? These tautologies symbolise the circularity of his work, similitudes that hop from Latin to French or English and back again. He knows the structure of his plants from smooth to sharp, hollow or pithy, investigates them to their very marrow and venerates them in these acts of creation. ‘Plants aren’t just a material. For me, they’re a religion, a memory’.
