Queen of Cardboard

Let me introduce myself, I am Jocelyn Campbell the self proclaimed "Queen of Cardboard." When I was born, there began a long journey with paper, cardboard, and the colour purple.

Purple has always been my favorite colour. As a child I absolutely loved the purple papers that peaches were wrapped in every year in the baskets from the Niagara fruit belt. My mother hand knit the ultimate skating outfit for me in the most beautiful purple yarn with white angora trim so I could pretend to be Sonja Henie skating under the winter stars. I always insisted on getting the purple cup and the purple bowl and fought with my brother and sister over them. Grape popsicles were the only ones I wanted, and I loved purple smarties and purple jelly beans more than any other colour. Somehow the purple ones just tasted better.

Paper has always been full of magic for me too. My father enchanted me with tales of building paper airplanes when he was a boy - out of the green tissue paper that wrapped those mandarin oranges we only saw at Christmas. I loved to cut out snowflakes and tape them on the windows so I could watch the patterns and shadows on the wall. As a little girl I never tired of hiding out under the dining room table with the tablecloth forming sides of an exotic tent and cutting out heads and bodies of characters from the Sears catalogue to be glued into crazy creations with that clear amber coloured muselage in those funny containers with the red rubber top. When I grew up, I went to the University of Alberta to become an Occupational Therapist. In the second year of my studies, I met a therapist there who was visiting from Japan, Yutaka Ueda. I will always treasure the rush from that first moment of success when my Japanese friend taught me to fold traditional cranes. I have been addicted to Origami ever since. I regularly dream of travelling to Japan and losing myself in the paper market there. Origami paper came with me on my first trip to Haiti. One night during a power outage - electricity is always on "intermittent" in Haiti - I showed some of the team how to fold cranes by headlamp light and we created a colourful mobile to hang in one of the orphanages. Paper wouldn't last forever, but it was a simple way to provide some visual stimulation for the children there.

Cardboard always meant play in my family. We could make anything out of a simple cardboard box, in fact those boxes were some of the best toys we ever had. Shoe boxes were puppet theatres, giant boxes were caves to hide in and let someone else close the flaps to make it really really dark. In University I belonged to a very creative study group. I think I still have the cardboard oversized hand we made complete with coloured woolen nerves and detachable muscles. When Alan, Rogan, and I were travelling around Europe in a camper van in the late 80's as part of our two and a half year "tour du monde" odyssey, Rogan had a cardboard box airplane at the campground in Budapest. And now, after all those years and with all that preparation behind me, I have a passion for building strong durable furniture and rehab aids out of paper and cardboard. This blue floor sitter and table I built for a little girl who needs support to sit with her classmates for circle time is one example. Passion for cardboard consumes my life at times, it fills my house and extends to sharing the delight with anyone I can convince to try it.
I am currently working on projects for teaching the techniques to people in the developing world in Haiti and Nigeria. Ever since August 2004 when I was fortunate enough to learn these techniques myself, I have wanted to share them with other people. I am especially interested in teaching APT to people in countries where it is expensive or difficult to get furniture or aids for people with disabilities, so knowing how to make things out of paper and cardboard can really make a difference in their lives.

HAITI
http://www.cbc.ca/nb/story/nb_furniture20060113.html
This is a link to a CBC story about me: "Queen of Cardboard helps Haitians." Haiti is part of the island of Hispaniola. It is in the Caribbean about 90 minutes from Florida and 90 milies from Cuba.














A group of about fifteen adults in Terrier Rouge, a small town in northern Haiti, participated in a 4 day APT workshop I presented in March 2005. APT stands for "Appropriate Paper Technology". They worked in small groups to complete three small stools. The stool project is good for beginners because it allows one to learn a lot of the basics, yet is small enough to be completed in a couple of days. I brought pre-finished laminated sheets of cardboard to work with so that the projects could be completed in the available time.

Here is one of the small groups in action. Two Sisters that live in Terrier Rouge, Sr. Reine and Sr. Doris, helped with the workshop. Sr. Doris assisted with translation as the workshop was taught in Haitian Kreyol. There is a very low literacy rate in Haiti, especially in the villages. Higher education is conducted in French, however, Kreyol is the language of the people. In the everyday world in Haiti, Kreyol wisdom is passed down through proverbs. There are countless proverbs, most have a number of layers of meaning: http://www.haitianproverbs.com/

One proverb says that rocks in the water do not understand the pain or misery of rocks in the sun “Woch nan dlo, pa konnen mizè wòch nan Solèy”. I think the only way we can learn to understand and help eachother is to reach out and make a start. My little cardboard stool, the first project I made entirely on my own, was created specifically to take to Haiti as a model for that first four day APT workshop. It has extra reinforcement and waterproofing to extend its life in harsh environments. The saying on the top edge "Panse andeyò bwat la" means "Think outside the box". It is another way of saying that I want you to believe it is possible to make furniture out of cardboard but you have to think in different ways to learn how. The education system in Haiti is based on rote learning, the assumption being that repeating the same thing over and over is the best and only way of learning it. The problems and challenges in Haiti, however; have not been solved yet by doing the same things over and over. Problem solving, innovation, and coming up with creative alternatives takes a lot of practice. As an Occupational Therapist I specialize in matching the demands of a task or activity to the needs of the person I am working with in ways that lead to greater independence for them. Appropriate Paper Technology projects demand constant problem solving, analyzing, and figuring out what to do next to make a strong and durable product. This is a very good match with what people in Haiti need to learn in order to make their lives and their country better.
Paper and cardboard are made of cellulose fibres that all started out as part of a tree. Rolling gives paper back some of its "tree-strength" by forming it back into layers of concentric rings. Corrugated cardboard is made by alternating flat paper and paper with waves (corrugations) which increases its strength. Layering, or laminating, a number of pieces of corrugated cardboard creates a strong yet light weight building material. The "grain" goes along the lines of those corrugations. Depending on the project being made and the lines of force expected, (for example sitting on a chair will create vertical lines of force down to the ground) layers can have alternating grain lines or have them all in one direction.