Inspired by her love of botanical detail and sustainability, Lauren Smith uses antique machinery, traditional techniques and natural materials to craft, dye and print her own luxuriously textured hand-made paper
WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY PHOTOGRAPHS KAT WEATHERILL
As a child, paper and letterpress printmaker Lauren Smith walked the country lanes of her childhood with her eyes on the hedgerows. Leaf litter, flowers and berries, spiny twigs, a mouse glimpsed scuttling from branch to branch and scratching songbirds; all fell under her imaginative gaze. “The happiest memories from my childhood are from the homes that were the most remote,” Lauren says. “They were always where I felt the most at home and the most myself. I’ve always looked at the detail in nature.”
Although she was a creative child, she left school without the confidence to pursue a career in the arts and picked something vocational instead. “I don’t have any regrets, but I do wish I’d had some role models to show me that a creative career was a viable option. There were plenty of voices saying that it wasn’t, so it took me a while to get here.”
While craft in general had always interested her, Lauren came upon papermaking during what she describes as a “deep dive” online. Seeing someone making it took her down a rabbit hole of research and reading that eventually led to her trying it herself. She was instantly transfixed. “It became an obsession. It grabbed me. I thought: ‘I could do this every day for the rest of my life.’ And every day I acquired to do this felt like a big win.”
Teaching herself and buying “every second-hand book on the topic I could find” brought Lauren as close to perfecting her practice as possible, and she eventually found a way to start a small business and explore her craft full time. “There came a point in my life when the pull was too strong to resist. All the scary thoughts – financial resources, not knowing who to ask for help – all that was drowned out by the need to do it. I knocked on a few doors and got some funding. That was a big moment because someone saw my potential and thought what I wanted to do was viable, and then the seed grew and grew. Self-belief is the most effective, powerful resource you can have when starting a business.”
Papermaking begins with a source materia
