The 2023 North American Hand Papermakers’ Triennial Juried Exhibition, Sustainability in Chaos, invited 30 paper artists to demonstrate their insight on the chaos of today's life. Through the medium of paper and its boundless style, sustainability, and conceptual framework, the exhibiting artists transform chaos into a vision of what is possible. Their work demonstrates how the arts and sustainability can elevate inspiration and leave a lasting impression on communities.
Anarchy, war, and disease have become our nation's daily concerns and only news. Even if we do not face these situations directly, in our social and economic lives, we witness the prevalence of chaos in various forms. With such sudden, surprising, and sometimes unexpected changes in our lifestyles today, Sustainability in Chaos is a show of resistance. Through the historical endurance of paper and its various papermaking artforms, the 30 featured artists issue an invitation to a quiet and peaceful moment that evokes a pleasurable experience that conveys freedom from chaos.
Helen Hiebert
Helen Hiebert constructs installations, sculptures, films, artists’ books and works in paper using handmade paper as her primary medium. She teaches, lectures and exhibits her work internationally and online, and is the author of the several how-to books about papermaking and papercrafts. Helen has an extensive network of paper colleagues around the world and her interest in how things are made (from paper) keeps her up-to-date on current paper trends, which she writes about on her weekly blog called The Sunday Paper. She also interviews papermakers and paper artists on her podcast Paper Talk, and I hold an annual paper retreat and papermaking master classes in her Red Cliff, Colorado studio.
Eileen Wallace
Eileen Wallace is a Senior Lecturer in Printmaking and Book Arts at the University of Georgia where she teaches courses in hand papermaking, book arts, and letterpress printing. She is a former resident artist at Penland School of Craft and has taught workshops at Penland, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and at other venues across the country. Eileen is a co-director emeritus of the Paper & Book Intensive (PBI) and has been a board member of Hand Papermaking Magazine. She curated the book Masters: Book Arts published by Lark Books.
Samuel Aguirre
Chair 03v07 B&W
2023, Fiber, 24" x 24" x 32"
Artist Bio — Samuel is currently pursuing an MFA in Furniture Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and intentionally working with commercially available, bio-based materials. The current environmental crisis does not allow for research to be exclusively focused on solutions that are decades into the future. Samuel's work adheres to a “here and now” mentality and is hyper-focused on material supply chains and means of production available today.
Artist Statement — The term "sustainability" has been diluted and misappropriated as a marketing tool. In reality, "sustainability" is not unique to any environmental movement or industry. It is simply “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” In the context of the current environmental crisis, sustainability can refer to the goal of safely coexisting with the natural world for an indefinite period of time. For the context of this work, achieving a sustainable outcome is to develop means and processes that benefit all stakeholders: the environment, the economy, and the community.
There is a disconnect in that furniture is used for five to ten years but is produced to exist for hundreds of years. This work considers not only how materials are sourced but also how long they will be used, where they go at the end of life, and how the entire lifecycle will impact the stakeholders.
E. Ainsley
Tombstone
2022, Cast paper pulp, mica pigment, salvaged wood, 3'.7" x 18" x 7"
Artist Bio — Over the past few years, I've been lucky to have a robust herb garden. I love planting, harvesting, drying, steeping, and sipping. There is a similar rhythm in the process of paper making that keeps me coming back to the medium. Chip, soak, cook, beat, pull, press - very elemental. In the studio, I often think about dreams, cycles, and rituals of marking time. I completed my MFA in 2021 and worked the next two seasons as a farmer and herbalist. My relationship with the prairie ecosystem deepened significantly, as did my fascination with the history held by plant matter.
Artist Statement — The site of research and installation for Tombstone was an old cotton rag paper mill in Vicksburg, MI, that was shut down in 2001. The vat in the lower level was the most interesting spot to me. This is where the water dumped down as it was pressed from the beaten cotton moving through the massive Fourdrinier machine above. Nearly 100 years of this cycle eroded the concrete of the vat below, revealing a jagged surface of coarse aggregates.
Through a visit to the historical society and discussions with locals (and even a psychic medium), I came to find out the only two deaths on record at the mill happened right above the vat where I was making the silicone mold. I took this into consideration as I mixed the pigment for the pulp, and the sculpture began to resemble a Tombstone - sparkly, pulled up from the depths, given new life.
While making this piece in solitude, I thought about the power of water and the impact of industry on the soft human animal. I thought about how paper is both strong and delicate. I thought about making an offering to close a loop.
Karen Baldner
Breath
2022, Shaped handmade kozo paper with embedded porcupine quills, colored pencil, 42" x 13"
Artist Bio — Karen Baldner’s work is based in papermaking, drawing/printmaking, installations, and experimental book structures and is represented by Vamp & Tramp Booksellers and Booklyn. She is on the faculty of Herron School of Art & Design, Indiana University/ Indianapolis where she teaches Book Arts, Papermaking, Letterpress and has established a minor in Book Arts. Karen’s work has been supported by National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright grants as well as state grants from Arkansas and Indiana. She shows extensively throughout the US and Europe, and her work is in many public and private collections in the US, Canada, and Germany.
Artist Statement — During the pandemic human encounters became questionable on an intimate level: the very foundation of our life, the air we inhale and exhale, had become questionable. - Paper slurry in its fluidity reminds me of our breath. When making these three connected discs, I blew onto the slurry to set it into motion and then captured the fiber movement on the mould. The dry discs were then laid onto a light table to trace some of the fibers' movement pattern.
Milcah Bassel
Continua: long red specimen
2022, Potential wearable: pigmented cast abaca fiber, 64" x 12" x 3"
Artist Bio — Milcah Bassel is a transdisciplinary artist raised in Israel and based in Jersey City. Incorporating installation, performance, drawing, and elemental media, her pieces invite physical engagement. Her work has been exhibited at the Rubin Museum, Bronx Museum, Zimmerli Art Museum, Newark Museum, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and ArtYard, among others. Awards include a NJ State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, Newark Artist Accelerator Grant, Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, and residencies at the Center for Book Arts NY, Brodsky Center, and Haystack Mountain School of Craft. Bassel earned her MFA from MGSA-Rutgers University and is currently a Lecturer at SMFA-Tufts University.
Artist Statement — In pursuit of a throughway between material and non-material realms, my work centers the somatic. Harnessing the experiential, I explore the body’s gross and subtle entwinements with culturally provoked systems and structures. What I accumulate through material inquiry in the studio emerges but also transforms with the engagement of others, taking form as interactive objects, installation, and participatory performance.
In Continua (2021-), the realms of body, architecture, and landscape are collapsed into porous paper skins. The skin continua are on a shapeshifting quest through the poetics and politics of embodiment, where forms are codependent, unsettled, and dynamic. Each piece in this series is an undulating composition of interconnected geometric units and comes in one of three sizes - specimen, pelt, blanket - ranging from cellular sample to potential wearable to collective membrane for our species. Rooted in the craft and material specificity of hand papermaking, the work comes alive through movement imagined and performed.
Muriel Condon
Molly Learns a Lesson
2022, Abaca, cotton, flax, found materials, 11" x 14"
Artist Bio — Muriel holds an MFA from University of Tennessee- Knoxville (‘22) and a BFA from Montana State University (‘16.) Between degrees, she assisted at Frogman’s Print Workshops in Omaha, NE, and was a postgraduate apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. She has been awarded residencies with Print Arts Northwest (Portland, OR), Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Poland, and the Morgan Paper Conservatory (Cleveland, OH.) She has shown internationally and participated in multiple print exchanges, including organizing a fabric based quilt print exchange.
Artist Statement — "Molly Learns a Lesson" is part of a handmade paper series I made working with vintage cross stitch patterns and scraps of fabric, named after the American girl doll, Molly. Diagrammatic and intentional- I wanted them to analytical, reflecting tenderness but a portraying a distance found in dissecting American nostalgia. Laminating objects in paper feels like a suspension of time and an act of preservation, but doing so obstructs seeing the objects clearly, just as holding onto the past can create a distance between memory and reality.
My practice uses material transformation and craft practices to invite a moment of comfort and tactile reflection. Through playful forms, object vignettes, and soft surfaces my work earnestly offers levity, while reflecting on the fallibility of established social structures and collective memory. The fibers of my work are built by personal memories as a daughter of an Irish immigrant, cooked in American fantasy, nostalgia, and instability.
Colleen Couch
Neighborhood Threat
2023, Handmade abaca paper, bailing wire, found objects, 4' x 4'
Artist Bio — I am a papermaker from Memphis, TN, and graduated in 2000 with a BFA in sculpture from the Memphis College of Art. While studying there, I enrolled in a papermaking course and instantly began merging the medium into my sculptural practice. In addition to gallery-oriented work, I also run a small design company called Flax & Fern, where I create custom light fixtures and lampshades from handmade paper.
Artist Statement — The piece, Neighborhood Threat, is an expression of the dire state of trash in our lives. We take for granted how much we produce, where we place it, and eventually how much space it will invade and destroy. I collected trash from a local historic park and used it as the center of the handmade paper and wire flower forms in this piece. At first glance, it enhances the beauty of the flowers. But the realization of its presence will hopefully encourage the viewer to think twice about ways they can modify their own relationship with trash.
Kerri Cushman
Tracings
2023, Handmade paper, pulp pochoir, silk thread, 11" x 7" x 1" (closed), 11" x 7" x 60’’ (open)
Homage to RBG
2023, Handmade paper (denim/cotton), letterpress, 20" x 20" x 4"
Artist Bio — Kerri Cushman is a sculptural book artist and papermaker with an affinity for letterpress. She teaches papermaking, bookbinding, and letterpress printing at Longwood University in Virginia. Known for her exquisitely crafted works, Cushman exhibits her art internationally. Her innovative work was selected for the cover of 500 Handmade Books, featured in Hand Papermaking’s portfolio Fiber Exposed! and The Language of Color, and published in 500 Handmade Books vol. I & vol. II, 1000 Artists’ Books, and 500 Paper Objects. She has been awarded international residencies, conducts workshops across the country, and is the proprietor of Performing Goats Press.
Artist Statement
So... what is a book?
Is it defined by its form?
Could a book, like a vessel, be a container of knowledge, or is it just a sequence of spaces? Should it be confrontational or conversational?
But most importantly, what can a book do?
I am interested in the fluctuating importance paper and print play in our everyday lives. My work reflects the evolution of writing methods and systems drawing parallels between craft, practicality, and the future of communication. How do we make sense of our ever-changing, chaotic world? In this information age, I see sculptural books and paper as an interdisciplinary link—a nexus between tradition and the future.
Neil Daigle Orians
Ghost of my previous bodies
2023, Pulp painting with cotton from reclaimed clothing that no longer fits me and shirt seams, 26.5" x 31.5"
Artist Bio — Neil Daigle Orians (they/he) is an artist, curator, and educator living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio. They received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and MFA in Studio Art from the University of Connecticut. They have received residencies from the International Print Center of New York, Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), and The Morgan Conservatory (Cleveland, OH). Recent exhibition venues and project sites include: International Center for Printmaking (New York, NY); Salisbury University (Salisbury, MD); and Alexander Brest Gallery (Jacksonville, FL). They are currently an Assistant Professor and Area Head of Printmaking at the University of Cincinnati.
Artist Statement — This work was created during a residency at the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, Ohio in May of 2023. I reclaimed various pieces of clothing that no longer fit me into pulp to create paper that carried with it the ghosts of my previous bodies, acting as a cathartic ritual to exorcize the shame and guilt I've carried. Through the process I found the seams evoked a sense of my body without literally depicting it, creating ghostly forms that float off the wall. Interior imagery utilizes triangular motifs I scribble in the margins of my notebooks when I'm anxious alongside depictions of my stretch marks.
Marjorie Fedyszyn
Free Form
2023, Wet handmade over-beaten abaca paper, wrapped, tied, and knotted around garments which were then removed, 38" x 30" x 8"
Artist Bio — Marjorie Fedyszyn, (she/her) is a Minnesota-based artist and educator who addresses the universal experiences of loss and human vulnerability through her sculptural practice. Applying traditional craft techniques, her inherent use of materials and attention to process express ideas from personal grief and introspection to broad environmental concerns.
Fedyszyn has exhibited regionally and nationally and is a 2023 McKnight Fiber Artist Fellow and the recipient of the 2019 Jerome Visual Arts Fellowship as well as other grants to support her work. Her studio practice is in the historic Casket Arts Building in NE Minneapolis.
Artist Statement — For years I believed my art embodied the tension between restraint, power, and the control I was convinced I had. I now realize those ideas distill down to the universal experience of loss and vulnerability. My losses shape who I am and are expressed through the abstract sculpture and installations I create. These forms are often body+emotional stand-ins of me, representing significant events from my life. Interpreting the past through my work makes it bearable.
The pandemic was the source of profound fear and anxiety which caused great pain and loss for many of us. Each day, a beloved friend quietly struggled, untethered and isolated until life became unendurable. Before the vaccine was developed, she eventually took her own life.
“Free Form” is a meditation on the life and memory of this dear friend. The repetitive tactile process of carefully wrapping and knotting articles of her clothing in wet over-beaten abaca twine helped ease the grief to recall memories we shared. The constricting twine retained the form of the garments once dry, creating a vestige of our time together.
Ana Fernandez
Bellum Corpus I
2023, Sprayed pulp painting, 44" x 32"
Artist Bio — Ana Fernandez is an artist currently based in the US and Spain. She was born in Madrid and obtained undergraduate degrees in Fine Arts (Printmaking and Fibers) and Japanese Language and Literature from the University of Washington, along with an MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has worked at the University of Michigan as the Print Media Coordinator at the School of Art and as faculty teaching drawing and printmaking courses at the Residential College.
She has participated in group and solo exhibitions in the US and abroad, including Japan, Cuba, Scotland, Italy, France, and Spain. Her artwork includes elements of printmaking, painting, drawing, fibers, and digital collage. It reflects a tactile sensibility and an affinity for layering, patterning, and ornamentation. Thematically, it focuses on the interaction between fashion, representations of the female body, and notions of femininity.
Artist Statement — My artwork involves drawing, painting, printmaking, papermaking, and collage. It reflects a tactile sensibility and an affinity for layering, patterning, and ornamentation. Originally, it focused on the interaction among the female body, advertising, and fashion, and it viewed the female body as a repository of cultural and psychological experiences. I was interested in how fashion and female display are implicated in the construction of a female identity, along with political + social messages regarding popular perceptions of female beauty. My visual vocabulary included motifs referencing struggle, renewal, joy, and a fascination with beauty, biology, myth, and belief.
Later my interest shifted towards the formal relationships between clothing and the female body, considering the body and the layers wrapping it – skin and garment – as a meditation on identity & self. The garment was a “second skin” that simultaneously hides and reveals, or a carcass that echoes the body in its absence. I incorporated imagery that relates to body and garment, sometimes conceiving the two as one, intermingling them into a single organism.
Currently, I am representing the female body in a less concrete and finite way. No longer simply concerned by its outer shell, I am inspired by imagined visions of its insides, microbiology, and a pulsing emotional and spiritual inner landscape. I conceptualize it as being connected to nature and to perennial and inexplicable forces that guide and shape it.
Hazel Glass
From Primordial Sprouts Order
2023, 40 layers of hand cut handmade paper, 9" x 12" x 2"
Artist Bio — Hazel Glass firmly believes that bigger is not better. She finds both the meticulous technical challenges and the resulting delicacy of working small too intriguing to ignore. Her originals are hand-cut using an Xacto knife, building them up layer by layer to form intricate windows into abstracted worlds. Her Paper Strata sculptures began as a studio experiment in 2015 and have since taken her around the world through dozens of exhibitions and publications. Though she has called many places home over the years, she only ever really meant it about Portland, Oregon.
Artist Statement — Many see chaos in the roots of a tree, the wind erosion of stone, a rolling storm in the clouds. But these organic patterns in nature are the first structure that all others are built upon. Look no further than a mirror to see that the wildness of nature contains symmetry; see in a honeycomb or the gills of a mushroom that it contains the repeating motifs of design.
My work imitates these organic patterns. Their layers build texture, like the raw edge of a cliff showing the strata of the earth.
From Primordial Sprouts Order is specifically addressing how even in the chaos of the Big Bang, patterns were born. By the time life came along, the structure of the universe was well established, even if it felt wild and unpredictable to the observer.
Warm greens with hints of clay-orange emulate the way life breaks down into soil to sprout anew. New life, new leaves, new layers added to the earth when they pass. The cycle of creation.
Joyce Gold
Rippling Forms
2023, Handmade paper, 18" X 20" X 6"
Artist Bio — Paper artist Joyce Gold pushes the boundaries of traditional papermaking to create works that are new and innovative. Her work has been described “...it punctuates the depth and breath of papermaking.” Joyce uses various plant fibers with assorted papermaking techniques and markings to accentuate the profound layers and complexity of her work. Her work has been selected in many exhibitions across the nation and is also the recipient of awards from D'Art Gallery, Arnold Grummer, Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory, and Fiber Art Now magazine. Joyce creates her paper works in her studio in Denver, CO.
Artist Statement — ‘Rippling Forms’ explores the fluidity of paper in chaos, with a particular focus on the rippling effect of water and its surrounding shore line. Through my work, I aim to capture the complexity of papermaking. I included flat sheets of handmade paper bundled with thread to emphasize paper in its expected ‘common’ form. By experimenting with various paper fibers and techniques, I seek to push the boundaries of what is possible in papermaking and to create pieces that are dynamic and engaging to give breath to paper.
Melissa Harshman
White Chrysanthemum
2022, Cotton Blowout on Abaca, 55" x 70"
Artist Bio — Melissa Harshman received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992. She has taught at the University of Georgia since 1993. She was awarded a UGA Senior Faculty Research Grant in 2019 titled “Explorations in Papermaking” and an Arts Lab Fellowship in 2022/23 focusing on papermaking wall installations. In 2022 she was awarded the Denbo Fellowship from Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center in Hyattsville, Maryland focusing on handmade paper. Her work was recently on display in “When Print Meets Paper” at the Robert C. Williams Papermaking Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, and “ArtFields 2023” in Lake City, South Carolina.
Artist Statement — In the piece “White Chrysanthemum” I have created a large, modular work with a white cotton blow-out image of a white chrysanthemum on an abaca base. White chrysanthemums have different meanings in cultures but often symbolize grief, mourning, and death. They are often used at funerals. The death of my father in 2021 inspired my use of white chrysanthemums in my work.
The irregularities in the way the paper dried are metaphors for the unexpected twists and turns of our lives. I chose abaca as a base sheet for its translucent yet strong nature, reminiscent of the strength and resiliency of skin but also referencing its delicate qualities. The process of beating down the fibers into pulp and then reforming them into paper parallels the circle of life that happens when all life passes from one manifestation to another.
This large work is a memorial for all those who have lost a loved one and a place to reflect on their lives.
Rose Menyon Heflin
Impending Doom, Self-Inflicted
2021, Mixed Media: Handmade Paper (Recycled Denim) & Paper- Dipped Chicken Wire, 23" x 23" x 10"
Artist Bio — Rose Menyon Heflin lives in Madison, Wisconsin, although she grew up in rural southern Kentucky. She spent her childhood running barefoot, wild and free - practically feral - among fields and forests. This instilled a lifelong love of nature, compelling her to major in environmental studies. As a very material- and issues-driven artist, she frequently utilizes natural and/or unconventional supplies to address ecological themes from advocatory scientific and/or social justice perspectives. Her photographs and prints have appeared in local and statewide exhibits, and her handmade paper pieces have been shown at the Midwest Paper Fest and Paper on the River.
Artist Statement — This piece comments on our mistreatment of Earth and the subsequent ecological and social catastrophes now afflicting us. Among other things, the gray cloud of paper-dipped wire represents the ecological damage we have thoughtlessly inflicted. Additionally, this work addresses the social wrongs resulting from our cis hetero patriarchal society - those unfair and disproportionate burdens dropped cruelly and heavily upon the shoulders of BIPOC, women, LGBTQIA2S+, disabled, poor, and other communities treated so unjustly by a system that has continually used and oppressed them, all the while benefiting the elite few. This is represented by how the Earth, which symbolizes both the environment and society (particularly the aforementioned marginalized populations) is situated in a corner, with nature and the affected groups having their backs against a wall, ultimately taking the brunt of the repercussions for our collective actions. The cage’s gray coloration symbolizes the pollution, the injustice, the environmental degradation, and the ominously looming darkness awaiting us due to our own actions. Similarly, the outer structure’s cage-like configuration also represents the fact that we and our future are essentially in a prison of our own making, with narrow slits at the back indicating our slim hopes of escape.
Chelsea Herman
A Book of Spells
2022, Altered Book, 2" X 6.6" X 9.6"
Artist Bio — Chelsea Herman is a visual artist and educator specializing in the art of the book. Herman’s artists’ books and works on paper have been exhibited at the Oceanside Museum of Art, the International Collection of Contemporary Creative Books, Atelier Vis-a-Vis in Marseille, France, and Art Around Books in Bellows Falls, Vermont among others. She served as instructor of book arts and papermaking as well as coordinator of the University of Nebraska Omaha Fine Arts Press and is currently the proprietor of Flight Path Press, a private press in Council Bluffs, Iowa specializing in limited edition, fine press artists’ books.
Artist Statement — A Book of Spells by Chelsea Herman alters the binding and cover of Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez. The specificity of Lopez’s descriptions of animals, land, light, temperature, navigation, and human lives may occlude or—depending on the reader’s access to her own sensory memories of the land— transport through vivid, dream-like clarity. Lopez’s text is ‘recovered’ to consider how the power of the text to move the reader depends on the renewal of her own lived experiences of nature. Markers laminated between handmade abaca paper evidence lived, sensory experiences of land. Gestural, asemic texts respond to sounds, movement, and natural forces perceived in ecological remnants.
The book represents an effort to listen for and find what Lopez describes and the land’s ‘innate rhythms’ in the ecological chaos of the Midwest’s heavily farmed, suburban environments. Using dye from local plants growing as weeds, on margins or remnants becomes a gesture or ritual encounter with the land that practices ideas presented in the text. The imagination necessary for artistic creation, reading Lopez’s text, or knowing the land evolve through physical engagement with dynamic, meaning-rich materials and landscape which sometimes become one and the same.
Daniel Heyman
Summer Squall
2021, Woodblock printed kozo paper mounted into a scroll, 28' x 20"
Artist Bio — Daniel Heyman, recipient of Guggenheim and Pew Fellowships, has had residencies at Dartmouth College, MacDowell, and Yaddo, in Japan and Israel. Heyman’s work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Getty Research Institute. Heyman who lives in Rhode Island, was Department Head of Printmaking at RISD in 2021-22. His recent solo exhibition, “Summons: Daniel Heyman” was at Cade Tompkins Projects. Thematically Heyman has focused on survivors of military sexual assault, the routine abuse of civilian human rights described as “collateral damage” and the torture of innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, 2003-7. “Native Impressions” --26 prints created with ND artist Lucy Ganje--is touring Texas thru 2024.
Artist Statement — "Summer Squall," finished in 2021, is a 28 foot long, woodblock printed scroll on 100% kozo hand-made paper from Echizen, Japan. After making over a dozen trips to the Awagami Factory to make my own paper, I brought students to make paper in Echizen in 2020. Dedicated to the ideal of a teaching artist, I teach Japanese Paper Making at RISD, starting with kozo bark and finishing with paper and objects made of paper.
Inspired by the scrolls of East Asia and the Torah – the scroll of the Jewish Old Testament I studied when I was young, and my interest in book arts, "Summer Squall” is a story with a moral, read from left to right that shows the gathering of a violent summer storm near the ponds, dunes, pine forests and beaches of Truro, Massachusetts, and the fear that this storm brings to one face. I have been caught in summer squalls twice, once as a teenager in a small boat on Long Island Sound, the second time on an empty Cape beach between high dunes and the ocean. Both events were dangerous. As a teenager, I was thrilled; as an adult I was frightened. These are the autobiographical notes in this work. The larger metaphor is of extreme weather caused by climate change, its irreversibility and inevitability. Climate change frightens me, and my work addresses it more and more directly. I work with sustainable fibers to make paper and inks (I grow and collect many plants for this purpose) though “Squall” was printed using oil-based inks on commissioned Echizen paper.
Heather Kohlmeier
Suspended Shelf
2023, Abaca, flax, linen thread, steel, 76" x 14" x 4"
Artist Bio — Heather Kohlmeier is an interdisciplinary artist, papermaker, and educator. She is currently pursuing an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a focus in design studies and papermaking. She has broad teaching experience in textile and fiber arts and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
Process and material are central to her making practice and inspire her creation of both functional and sculptural forms. These forms are often a study of translucency, as well as the relationship of strength and fragility found within the natural world.
Artist Statement — This collection of paper scrolls began as an exploration of color through the study of historic textiles. This study was interrupted when I experienced a significant concussion, making many tasks and daily activities impossible. My brain was incapable of processing the world around me as it had before. I was forced to slow down and listen to my body. This experience transformed my study of color to a comforting and beloved ritual of performing a simple, well-known gesture – the gesture of pulling a sheet.
Suspended Shelf mimics the path of my sweeping wingspan. Neutral colored scrolls of various levels of thickness and texture rest atop the shelf as book binding thread tumbles out from within its pages. These paper scrolls are thin and delicate yet strong and resilient. Though they contain no words or images, they are not blank. They hold space and light, as well as time and memory. I find myself comforted by the process, the ritual, of forming sheet after sheet of increasingly thin paper. The delicately rolled sheets gathered as a collection become a lush accumulation celebrating material, process, air, and light qualities that are at the heart of my practice.
Tami Komai
Filling-in/Filling-out, Filling-out/Filling-in
2023, Kozo pulp, chicken wire, 15" x 8" x 6.2" & 8.6" x 9.4" x 9.4"
Artist Bio — Born in 1948 in NYC.
Lived in India, stints in Japan, and since 1972 in Basel, Switzerland. Studied: Photography, Skidmore College, 1971, Graphic Design, Basel School of Design, 1972-1978 Teaching: Basic design and color Since 1996, I have worked with "Paper" in various ways Graphic Experience: 2007- etching 2019- relief printing, primarily linoleum, cardboard, and self-made plates Since 2022: working to unite print and paper per se in unique ways Since 2023: washi per se in Japan Membership: Druckwerk Basel, Visarte Switzerland, Dock Basel Private: married and have two grown children
Artist Statement — "Filling-in / Filling-out, Filling-out/ Filling-in" is the result of a very organic process, starting with washi pulp (kozo pur) and flat chicken wire. There was no pre-view.
The pieces took on their form during the dipping and rotating, crushing together and pulling apart. But along the way a feeling developed of "opposition" within one piece, as well as, to each other, as "antagonists": in-out; interior-exterior; elongated- compact; jagged-smooth; open-closed; light-dark. Also, inkling of extrovert-introvert and active-passive come through.
Each piece is an entity in itself. It can be regarded independently. However, the two together produce a polarity. For this reason, the title is doubled in reverse, " ...in/out, ...out/in. "
The pieces have no fixed viewing angle. They can be on a table or hung or a combination. They can be close to each other or at a distance. I would like to thank Tsuguo Yanai, a Japanese washi artist, for sharing his bountiful expertise and experiences with me.
Noah Lagle
Collected Sayings # 17 (Spacious)
2021, Collage, handmade folder made from pulped dictionaries, 19" x 12.5"
Collected Sayings # 10 (False Peaks)
2021, Collage, handmade folder made from pulped dictionaries, 19" x 12.5"
Artist Bio — Noah Lagle has three home towns, with his lifetime split evenly between San Diego, CA; West Chester, PA; and Burlington, VT. He has just finished pursuing his MFA in Printmaking at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and has moved to Athens, GA to work at the Lyndon House Arts Center. Founder of Public Works Press, Lagle has printed and published the work of contemporary artists while facilitating public printmaking workshops. He is also a musician, an outdoor educator, and an avid board game player.
Artist Statement — My research is rooted in examinations of language, materiality, and information systems and how they are synthesized to construct understandings of our world. I explore methods used to substantialize our memory through the collection of objects. Spaces like libraries, museums, and archives stand as monumental repositories for collected knowledge. However, it is on the scale of intimately sized receptacles like books, bins, and folders where personalized indexing methods like bookmarks, highlighted text and marginal notes show how these intellectual realms are enacted through collaborative performance. This work confronts the nature of the aqueous boundaries we use to frame narratives. By breaking down dictionaries and making them into folders, these pieces both transgress and reaffirm the lines of delineation that serve to separate, contain, define, and construct meanings that subsequently become embedded and adapted in accordance with perpetually shifting social schemata. Letters are still visible in the handmade paper, representing the smallest units of inquiry within a recursive organizational structure that is eventually reflected at the level of the paradigm. By building an understanding of the micro-level elements vis-à-vis their relationship to the macro-level structures, each repetition of the act of containment and definition embodies a new space to explore.
Roberta Lavadour
Shift
2023, Handmade Paper with graphite drawings in a 3D structure, 12" x 12" x 12"
Artist Bio — Roberta Lavadour lives and works in rural eastern Oregon, near the foothills of the Blue Mountains. Her work is fueled by a rampant curiosity and explores a range of themes sparked by everything from estate sale finds to her tangled family history. She's been exhibiting artist's books and design bindings for twenty- five years and has contributed innovative structures to the book arts field. In addition to maintaining an active studio practice, she teaches in workshop settings, sharing a passion for both sound construction and fearless exploration.
Artist Statement — Like most papermakers, I've never been able to part with even the smallest scraps of paper I've made over the years, allowing for a wealth of possibilities when addressing a new work. I also can't separate the experience of collecting fibers for a batch of paper from any of the finished works they appear in, so the feeling of hiking up Mission Creek and harvesting rushes for the base paper is baked into this for me. These round sheets were made 15 years ago and sat in the studio, waiting for the right spark. The way the marks play with the perception of depth and space as one moves around the work emerged from the process and became a metaphor for the tension between fragility and sustainability.
Sophie Loubere
The Tall Grass
2023, Etchings on Flax Handmade Paper, 9" x 12"
Artist Bio — Sophie Loubere is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest. Her work is research-based, focusing on printmaking, handmade paper, and alternative photography. She earned an MFA in Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BFA in Illustration at Rhode Island School of Design. She currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Loubere is an award-winning artist. Most recently, she received the Caxton Club Grant for a project in book arts. She has taught classes, workshops, and led demos at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Gage Academy of Art, Editions Studio, and Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.
Artist Statement — The intaglio plate in this piece was etched using soft and hard grounds, aquatint, and spit bite. The layers are all printed from the same plate, wiped and pulled as unique monoprints. The layers have been stacked, evoking themes of time, space, and memory as wiped and held by the plate. The image is something unreal, some textures pulled from real plants, others drawn, a romanticization of a landscape. The paper is long beaten flax.
My work explores the relationship between humans, nature, and deep time. Researched history provides context as I question why our world, sublime in complexity, is the way it is.
I weave stories, images, and collected material together using print and papermaking, alternative photography processes, and creative writing. These interdisciplinary processes create deeply researched, multi-textured, multi-layered experiences that engage sight, sound, smell, and touch. My work aims to pull viewers toward timelessness while pushing them to consider their place in the world.
Anne Marble
Artifact
2023, Paper, knit twine, and wire, 10" x 20"
Artist Bio — Anne Marble comes from an atypical, multidimensional background, earning a degree in biology and a master’s degree in environmental science. Her art training is embedded in coursework in multiple mediums including printmaking, sculpture, and painting.
In 2008, Anne had her first solo exhibition. Nationally she has shown at the Rosenfeld Gallery, Fiber Arts X International Sebastopol California, Gallery Fritz, Smithsonian Affiliate Gallery, and the Morgan Conservatory.
Internationally she has shown in Sophia, Bulgaria at the Amaterus International Paper Artfest, in Shanghai, China, and Tasmania, Australia for the Coral Jubilee of the International Association of Papermakers (IAPMA), Dresden, Germany, and Ivano-Franivs’k Ukraine.
Artist Statement — I am a biologist as well as an artist by training. My art is informed by a scientific and intuitive understanding of the complexity of interrelationships that I have examined, admired, and thought about for decades. At the core of my work is an emotional contact with living things.
My relationship to nature has informed my perception of reality. It is the source of my core well-being coming from a place beyond the senses. References in my work come from places I call outwardly and inwardly atmospheric: the light, the dark, the movement of air, and the silent and secretive passages through it.
As a medium, fiber art expresses the natural balance between strength and fragility. It is at once tender and light, strong and forgiving. Especially in its raw and undecorated state, it expresses connection to a world beyond, both seen and unseen. If I yield to this connection, artmaking takes on its own process and expression, using my hands as tools to tell its story. It is an exercise in surrendering myself from preconceived notions about process and results and trusting the medium to take command and to be my guide.
Scott Murphy
Time's Shadow
2023, Handmade Cotton Paper, Natural Onion Dye, Letterpress Printing, Pamphlet Stitch, 4.5" x 6"
Artist Bio — Scott K. Murphy is a book artist who, under the nom de plume, The Befuddled Press, produces handmade paper, artist books, broadsides, and photographs which explore the beauty, absurdity, simplicity, and complexity of existence. His often philosophical artwork combines traditional book-making techniques, like letterpress printing and hand-papermaking, with contemporary digital technologies. The combination of digital and analog methods is used to create artworks that have a textural quality so that they are an experience for the hands as well as the eyes. You can find this work in more than thirty-five public collections, mostly in library special collections.
Artist Statement — The world is a challenging place. It seems to be getting even more so every day. I make artwork to help me come to terms with this reality. Time’s Shadow is an artist book that features a collaboration with sixteen poets writing haiku or senryu about love. The poems and extended title, featuring text from Mary Oliver, look at the ways in which love and loss are intertwined in how we view and cope with everything in life. The haiku were juried from a call to poets in the Haiku Society of America. The handmade cotton paper, design, letterpress printing, onion dying, & pamphlet stitching were executed by the artist. From an edition of 91.
Phan Hai Bang
Lotus in spontaneity- the delight #1
2022, Woodcut, Trucchigraphy, 37.4" x 86.6"
Artist Bio — Phan Hải Bằng is a senior lecturer of art and design at College of Arts, Huế University, Vietnam. Studying papermaking from master craftsmen in Vietnam and Thailand, he has been a pursuer of Vietnamese traditional crafts, design, culture, and papermaking. Phan developed the project Trúc Chỉ in 2011 with his colleagues, and it is now a celebrated paper art and craft form in Vietnam. His Trúc chỉ works were selected for the permanent collection of Vietnam Fine Art Museum. Phan was recently awarded the Lebadang Creative Arts Award in Vietnam and has shown his works internationally.
Artist Statement — My concept is: “New light, new sight, new life.”
Thus, everything will get a new life (life in art) if we look and think about them in the new sight and the new light.
The “lotus in spontaneity” images were born from the combination of lotus flower, fruit, seed, trunk, leave, fiber...and the female breast, like a symbol of life and death. Then, they have got their private life, where they live, flying, dancing, suffering, happing, multiplying...and die... so I just follow them, together and live, listen...then tell you their story that I fell from them, in spontaneity...
And with the “paper,” for me, it is not only a blank background for other action on it anymore! Paper could have its inner light and its secret life. So, I and paper, fiber, pulp, fire, water, air... we are together in the amazing creative conversation...to make “paper” get more ability: be an artwork itself. And I call that: TRÚC CHỈ- mean Vietnamese paper art.
Jill Powers
Under the Forest Floor
2021, Artist book, Kozo, Lokta, Cave Paper, Original drawings etched with heat and light, sculptural cover illustration, 11.5" x 13" x 1.5", Case 16" x 12" x 3"
Artist Bio — Jill Powers’s art explores the aesthetics and science of biological forms within ecological issues. She creates sculptural and installation art with natural materials and processes. Jill uses traditional methods for bark fiber and then applies innovative techniques for beating, opening, and casting the fiber into sculptural and mixed-media forms. Jill writes about art and contemplative art practices. She has given talks and workshops at the Denver Botanical Garden, the Natural History Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Jill is a graduate of Tyler School of Art and has shown her work internationally.
Artist Statement — On a mushroom foray deep in the alpine forest near my home, I experienced a fleeting moment of profound awareness and delight. Beneath my feet, under a thick carpet of pine needles, I revealed the unseen mycelium network that produces mushrooms and fosters the creative decay and regeneration of the forest. This artist book, made of earthy fibrous papers, combines glimpses into the microscopic world of spores and spore prints with heat and light etched drawings of mushrooms and mycelium to present a visual narrative about the rich and inspiring microbial life beneath the forest floor.
Lori Spencer
Microbial Swamp
2023, Base sheet of couched cotton/abaca with a blowout, overlayed with a sheet of watermarked long beaten flax, 11" x 14"
Artist Bio — Lori Spencer is a printmaker and book artist who’s mark making tools range from the haptic, to the mechanical, to the digital, to the textual. Her works has been shown internationally, and is in a number of public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cleveland Institute of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Library of Congress. She received her BFA from the State University of New York at Purchase and her MFA in Book Arts & Printmaking from The University of the Arts. She is currently the director of the Book Arts & Printmaking MFA program at Uarts.
Artist Statement — Microbial Swamp addresses the potential of new growth to be born out of quagmire. It is meant as an optimistic metaphor for the possibility of societal change to spring forth from the cultural morass that currently surrounds us. The piece is composed of a base sheet of couched cotton/abaca with a blowout, overlayed with a sheet of watermarked long beaten flax.
Amanda Thackray
Untitled
2023, Ink on woven pigmented handmade flax paper, 9" x 11.5"
Artist Bio — Amanda Thackray is a multidisciplinary ecofeminist artist-educator based in Newark, NJ, who collaborates with biologists, ethnographers, natural/found fibers, and site-specific water to create tableaus that inspire environmentally-centered conversations. Thackray’s projects have been exhibited at diverse galleries and museums locally and nationally.
She is the recipient of Creative Catalyst Fund Fellowships (2020, 2021, 2022), Puffin Foundation Grant for Environmental Art (2021), and NJ State Council Individual Artist Fellowship (2022). Residencies include The Arctic Circle, Norway; The Center for Book Arts, NYC; and The Museum of Art and Design, NYC. Her work is in over a dozen international public collections.
Artist Statement — I am a dedicated educator and environmentalist, merging these elements in my practice as I engage the public with projects that combine art, science, and community. Much of my work is focused on human connection to waterways. I create work about the vast oceans, focusing on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, microplastics in the ocean, and the phenomenon of ghost nets.
My work is primarily foregrounded in traditional and experimental drawing, printmaking, and papermaking processes. Notably, I employ hand papermaking processes to create complex tableaus taking the form of lyrically floating, tangled netting. This work is guided by research into the burden of human-made detritus, particularly as they affect the ocean through the phenomenon of ghost nets and the plastisphere.
Recently, I have been exploring similarities between woven structures, patterning in water, and netted structures. I am interested in expressing my concerns about pollution in ways that are not didactic and creatively bisecting materialities of our world.
Kristen Tordella-Williams
Scar VI
2022, Rust painting on artist made denim paper, magnets, steel brackets, 4' x 3'
Artist Bio — Kristen Tordella-Williams transforms everyday materials from recycled waste to natural elements and unearths their connections to labor, social justice, and the body. She has shown worldwide, most recently in Berlin. She has been a resident at Salem Art Works in New York, the Tides Institute & Museum of Art, and the Ateliers im Alten Schlachthof in Sigmaringen, Germany. In 2023, she claimed 2nd place in Lake City's ArtFields competition among over 1000 entries for her piece, "40 Burnt Books." Currently, she presides as President of the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance and serves as an Associate Professor of Sculpture at Auburn University.
Artist Statement — "Scar VI" is one in a series of 10 works produced as a StudioWorks Artist in Residence at the Tides Institute in Eastport, ME. Eastport was the birthplace of the American sardine industry. The last sardine factory closed in the early 1980s but the remnants of the piers, wharves, and weirs of the industry litter the coast. While exploring the island, I took photos of these remnants and transferred them to large sheets of denim paper using iron. The images were then rusted, showing the stark beauty and decay resulting from industry on the island's landscape incorporated with the recycled remnants of my own past labor. "Scar VI" makes visible the impact industry and its associated labor has on our bodies, environments, and communities.
John Vinklarek
Regulator
2022, Cast Paper with Acrylic Patina, 10" x 20" x 8"
Artist Bio
Professor of Art: Angelo State University
M.F.A. University of Oregon
B.F.A. Texas Tech University
A native of West Texas, John Vinklarek joined the Angelo State University faculty in 1977. Vinklarek has exhibited in more than 230 national and international juried exhibitions and has been awarded many prizes. Some examples of Mr. Vinklarek's work include a 1000 foot mural for GTE in 1982 and a monumental bronze for the San Angelo Fire Department erected in 1986. Vinklarek has exhibited his work in many one man shows as well.
Artist Statement — I use water based paint to highlight the shapes and textures in the compositions I make in paper as well as other materials. I am interested in a kind of textureology in my work (a term coined by Dubuffet). I aim to give brutal abruptness to the shapes I use. I use rough textures to support the solidity of the shapes. I would like to call the feeling a kind of “Romantic ruin.” The corrosion and decay I aim to depict rises from my generally pessimistic mood (why does everyone have to be happy?). The answer lies in the Soft Machine tune "Why Are We Sleeping?" Adorno’s statement: “After Auschwitz, poetry is absurd” points to the mood of our time. The absurdity continues. With my face down in the mud as affirmed by Samuel Beckett, I resume the struggle.
Isabella Whitfield
Sincerely
2022, Sisal, abaca, plant fibers from hometown, 30" x 40"
Artist Bio — Isabella Whitfield is a multidisciplinary artist who works in collaboration with natural and manufactured environments. After graduating from the University of Virginia, she completed a postgraduate year as an Aunspaugh Fellow. Whitfield has exhibited with galleries around DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Residencies include the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Anderson Ranch, Ox-Bow, and Pyramid Atlantic. She is currently based in DC as a Hamiltonian Artists Fellow and is a Papermaking Associate at Pyramid Atlantic.
Artist Statement — By crafting paper tartans inspired by family stories, I examine the historical significance of tartans, which have long symbolized allegiance and group membership through their unique designs and colors. Throughout the paper-making process, I infuse the pulp with small amounts of beaten plant matter collected perennially from my hometown of Centreville, VA. The intersection and overlapping of lines form a quiet ambivalence, individually oppositional yet cohesively harmonious.
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