Paula Chung wanted to memorialize those who lost their lives to the deadly coronavirus and began creating a scroll of stitched spirals from her home on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. Each spiral represents the cycle of one’s life. Chung called this project, “Requiem.”
“I was getting madder and madder and felt like I had to do something. This is such an epic situation and I felt I needed some way of memorializing it.” –Paula Chung
Her work will be part of a new exhibit, “Lockdown,” from the Capital City Arts Initiative at Western Nevada College’s Bristlecone Gallery in Carson City, Nev., from Oct. 5 through Dec. 22. “Lockdown” is a visual representation of the art made by the three Northern Nevada artists during the 2020 pandemic as a way to protect themselves against isolation, to honor the lives lost and to stay creative. The exhibit also features works by Nancy Raven and Ted Rips.
“Lockdown”
Oct. 5-Dec. 22 | Bristlecone Gallery | Carson City, Nev.
Artists’ reception | Oct. 5, 5-6:30 p.m.
“This piece is born from anger, defiance and profound sadness for the negligent and inept responses of some of our leaders, the impact on all our lives and the inconsolable loss of life,” she wrote in her artist statement about the work.
She started “Requiem” in April 2020 and was about halfway through when we talked in August. She has stitched around 338,000 spirals on 40 scrolls of Japanese Unryu rice paper and will keep going until she reaches 600,000 spirals. The scrolls will be more than a mile long once completed.
Chung says she’s been working with fiber for most of her life; she sewed her clothes as a child. In 2004, she retired from her job in Southern California, moved to the Tahoe Sierra and started taking art classes at Lake Tahoe Community College.
“I took everything art related that I could take, and I had great teachers and small classes,” Chung says.
Even though Chung took an array of art classes, she always stayed involved in fiber. In 2014, Chung created a project called, “Silk & Sinew,” that featured embroidered images of X-rays and MRIs on hand-dyed silks. She then wanted to experiment with paper and wondered if tea bags would work.
“I was trying to get a kind of film that disintegrates in water to get the values to stitch onto,” she says. “I loved that the staining of the tea made it different.”
According to Chung, unexpected colors would come to life depending on what kind of teas she applied. After the completion of that project — and right before the pandemic — Chung experimented with mulberry paper to stitch on and did a series of artworks about gun violence.
In the beginning stages of the pandemic, she started experimenting with Unryu rice paper, also known as Cloud Dragon, which is proving to be a heartier material to stitch on.
“Paper made from silk is very strong and I felt this could withstand the torture of my needle,” she says. “[Cloud Dragon] has wonderful little fibers of silk running through it to make it stronger yet beautifully translucent.”
Using the right kind of material to stitch on makes all the difference because her sewing machine can get caught up with different threads and buckle, causing a tangled mess, she says. Fortunately, Chung says that now she has a commercial machine, which makes the process go much faster. It takes her about five hours to sew 1,000 spirals for “Requiem.”
When asked how she came to create a COVID-centric art project using this kind of paper, Chung says, “I was getting madder and madder and felt like I had to do something. This is such an epic situation and I felt I needed some way of memorializing it.”
At the same time, she had been studying trees and the life of a tree, reading about how interconnected they are to each other, how they will take care of each other, even among differing species.
“Their spirals symbolize their whole life cycle,” she says.
In creating “Requiem,” Chung uses a calendar to keep track of how many spirals she does a day; each spiral represents a life lost to the pandemic. As long as the pandemic keeps going on, Chung will as well.
“I’m going to keep going. When we reached 600,000 deaths [due to Covid], I thought, ‘We can’t go past that,’ but now with the resurgence, we’re at [67,822]. No one knew that this would go on this long. It’s frightening. The main reason why I started this is to remind us that these aren’t just numbers, they’re real people. Some people don’t even believe this is happening, but it is. I don’t want these people to be forgotten.” | paulachung.com, ccainv.org/lockdown
