Khadi - Coloured Lokta Paper - Lime
Available in 19.5” x 29.5” 500mm x 750mm
Gsm - 30
Texture - Medium
Paper drying on wooden frames, the frames angled towards the sun, on a terraced hillside at three thousand metres. High up, a range of white peaks with smoke blowing off them. Below, green terraces of barley and rice dropping away to a silver river, a paper factory never had a better view than this. Paper has been made in the foothills of the Himalayas for more than a thousand years.
It is made from the bark of a woody shrub, called lokta in Nepal and deyshin in Bhutan, which grows at high altitudes in the Himalayan forests. From Nepal we have three traditional lokta papers, made by pouring pulp onto the mould, a heavy wooden frame covered with cloth,which floats in a pool of water.
The mould is then propped upright and the sheet dries in the sun.Also from Nepal the range of Nagashizuki papers have been developed in Katmandu with Milan Dev and Mahesh Bhattarai. Nagashizuki is a Japanese method of papermaking in which pulp is formed in fine layers onto a silk back mould. A number of these papers have inclusions of bark, leaves and bamboo. The lokta for these papers is grown in the hill forest from seedlings.The planting and harvesting of the lokta creates work for the people who live in the hills and helps preserve theforests by creating a renewable resource within them. This project is run by Mahesh and one of the hill farmers, Shiva Ram.
From Bhutan, which borders Tibet and the north eastern frontier provinces of India, we have two traditional papers, Resho and Tsasho. These are made from thes ame sort of bark fibre as the Nepalese but they have a somewhat wilder character. Resho is made on clothcovered mould, like the Nepalese mountain paper. Tsasho is made on a mould of split bamboo and has a very distinctive laid pattern which is in effect the watermark of the bamboo mould.
