Pulp Press by John Gerrard + A2 Architects

Sits along the edge of the River Rands on the site of an old 19th-century paper mill, an hour north of Oslo, the Pulp Press is an installation art created by Irish artist John Gerrard in collaboration with Dublin-based A2 architects.

Artist: John Gerrard / Architects: A2 Architects
Location: Jevnaker, 3520, Norway
Photographs: Jiri Havran

The work consists of a large projected moving simulation of the original paper press, housed in a 100 sqm poured concrete pavilion, as a permanent site-specific commission for Kistefos Museum – one of Scandinavia’s largest parks of contemporary sculpture.

The cast concrete pavilion is a 13 × 6.5 meters open-ended volume, with one open façade facing the former paper mill and another facing the river. Its concrete form is embedded like an erratic onto a sloping river meadow.

They accumulate in metal hard-disk units on a nest of precast concrete and brass shelves inside the pavilion, emulating the piles of wood pulp bales that the mill once produced.

“Even digital data is stored in a physical world.”

Inspiration from the artist:

Pulp Press (Kistefos) 2013 is a hyper-realistic portrait of the machine, (which was decommissioned in 1950), painstakingly remade as a virtual form. Importantly, it has been renovated within the virtual to function once more.

Pipes have been replaced, valves sourced, missing components researched by the production team for over a year and recreated in simulacra. The press now generates bales of virtual paper pulp, each structurally unique and preserved as data in an ever-expanding store of hard drives housed sculpturally within the work.