From a little studio on the ground floor of the St. George?s Historical Society artist Kendra Ezekiel creates new items from the already used or from the freshly grown.

Kendra Ezekiel is pulling on the office strings to create the Paperwork exhibition. Miss Ezekiel is no stranger to the Island?s art scene and has displayed her unique pieces on numerous occasions.

But this time the assistant curator of the Bermuda Arts Centre at Dockyard is one of the Masterwork Foundation ?Artist Up Front Street?. Her show entitled ?Paperwork? opens on Friday evening at the Hamilton gallery.

Miss Ezekiel has chosen to use her working space and office items as the medium for her new show. ?I have been spending so much time in an office environment,? she said, ?I have been looking at other paper and recycling a lot of it.

?It works for me, because of working on the business side of art. There is a lot of paperwork involved that nobody thinks of. They only think of the end product and not what goes on behind or the production or the consumption of what is required.?

She is using fresh pulp from a Kozo tree and it will be in paper form for the show.

?It is a special type of tree ? mainly used for Asian paper,? she said.

Miss Ezekiel studied art and sculpture at university, but her love for papermaking and designing came later on.

?I would make a sculpture and it would be a heavy object, but at the end of it if nobody wanted to buy it then I?d be stuck with it,? she said.

?I was always environmentally conscious with my work and paper is a suitable material and I can always recycle it.?

She said there were lots of different ways of making paper and with these sheets I will disperse them by hand in a vat of water.

?It allows for you to add other materials, such as vegetation like leaves, plants and ash. I play around with the paper itself and the fibre and the bark. There are different grades although they are from the same tree.?

Sometimes she leaves the outer bark of the tree in for textural purposes.

?The tree was growing for about two-and-a-half years and we really just use small branches,? she said, ?They are usually only about an inch thick.?

Miss Ezekiel said the show will feature interesting everyday and annual throw aways.

? is going to be featured in the exhibition,? she said, ?I am having fun. It is taking a while and I have been playing around with different actions that one uses in an office, like folding and stapling.

?I am trying to do something creative with those mundane things.?

She said: ?I never know what the response is, because my work is not conventional. The last piece I did was an installation at the Bermuda Society of Arts and it was good for me because I enjoyed doing it, but at the opening I found that it was quite an annoying piece to a lot of people.

?There were crumpled pieces of egg box and different projects that I have been distracted by over the years. It was a lot of paper ? agendas and a lot of people wanted to kick it. It is fascinating and I don?t know what the response will be.

?It doesn?t bother me if people don?t like it. It at least promotes some response.?

One piece called Strata is made from telephone books.

?As far as I could, but I like lines and it is also the idea of the strata of the community,? said Miss Ezekiel, ?I was walking along the street and there was a box of old used telephone books, so I decided to recycle it. At home I have bags and boxes of paper.?

Miss Ezekiel said she was always encouraged to do art and she has did a lot of different things over the years, but paper has been her medium for the last ten years.

?It is rewarding,? she said, ?It?s like learning how to cook. I have done a few workshops and I have travelled. So its always an evolution. Learning new skills of what paper can do. It is such a flexible medium.?

She has learned so much about the materials she uses by doing it.

?Just how something is grown, where it is grown, when is it harvested ? all these things affect the outcome of the paper,? she said, ?So that fascinates me ? like I said it is like cooking. It is a science to it.?

Her studio is on the lower floor of the St. George?s Historical Society and she has her own little secret garden that she also draws inspiration from.

She said: ?I have a cotton tree that I can make paper from,? she said. ?And the bark of hibiscus is another suitable plant paper making. I have used it and it makes a strongish paper.

?I also have some spider lilies. It is quite wild out here and when I came this morning I thought it was a bit of a jungle.?

She also has a mulberry tree which was delivered to her by Works and Engineering staff.

?I just need the bark, but it is labour intensive,? she said, ?I?ll have to stand for a good week just stripping it.?

Miss Ezekiel has also made paper out of cedar bark, but the smell disappears in the papermaking process.

?I try different plants to see how they behave,? she said.

There are so many different qualities of what paper can do and one is its translucency, she said.

?When you are learning how to make paper, you are exploring all the different qualities and I focused on the translucency, which I love,? said Miss Ezekiel.

?I will have a few things in the show, which will play on that. Not just lamps, but some screens lit from behind.

?I?ve taken a lot of consideration of the space of the Gallery and I hope to transform it into a sensual experience.?

The exhibition opens on Friday evening at 5.30 p.m. until 7 p.m. at the Masterworks Gallery, Bermuda House Lane, Front Street, Hamilton.