Marilyn Sward

Now Departed Papermaking Champion

1941—2008

The following essay was originally published in the Summer 2009 issue of Hand Papermaking Magazine and is reprinted here with permission from HPM.

On August 5, 2008, we lost one of our nearest and dearest, Marilyn Sward, after a two-year battle with breast cancer. She was 67 years old. Marilyn was a longtime member of the Hand Papermaking board, and served two terms as board chair. In her native state of Illinois and throughout the field nationally and internationally, Marilyn’s influence and impact have been formidable. In 1972, with a partner, she started Paper Press in Evanston, Illinois. In the early 1990s Marilyn taught papermaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as adjunct professor in the fiber and material studies department. In 1995, she merged Paper Press with Artists’ Book Works to become the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. She was the center’s founding director and served on faculty there until her retirement in 2001. She led international collaborative papermaking and textile tours to numerous places including Italy, Japan, India, South Africa, and Indonesia, and taught and lectured at many schools and art centers including Penland, Anderson Ranch, and Haystack where she served as board president from 2005 to 2008. Marilyn co-authored The New Photography, co-created Treewhispers, an international paper installation project, and co-founded the Hunter/Howell Fellowship initiative. Those who worked with her know well and will keenly miss her energy, her commitment, and her singular and generous spirit. Reprints of memorial articles celebrating Marilyn Sward appear on our website, www.handpapermaking.org/magazine. For this issue of Hand Papermaking, we commissioned a commemorative paper sample from the Center for Book and Paper Arts and asked one of her close friends, renowned author and artist Audrey Niffenegger, to share her remembrance of Marilyn Sward.

For Marilyn Sward

In days of yore, when a king or queen died they were buried with all sorts of objects (and sometimes people, too) which they might need in the afterlife. Lesser mortals might be sent off with a few pots and a coin or two, but royalty would enter Heaven with boats, cats, bed linen, miniature soldiers, alcoholic beverages, rice, various bodily organs in jars, precious gems, a bus pass, a subscription to The New Yorker, etc., etc. And since Marilyn Sward was certainly a queen in the Empire of Papermaking, I have been making a list of the items she ought to be equipped with for her stay in the Papermakers’ Heaven.

First of all, Marilyn will need a studio. Since her own studio in St. Germaine, Wisconsin was rather heavenly, we can simply duplicate it. Marilyn designed it herself. It is a log cabin, with floor drains and a Valley beater. It is heated by a woodstove, so it is bracing to stick one’s hands into a vat of pulp early in the morning. Marilyn’s studio imparted a particular North Woods smell to the paper that was made in it. Eleven years later, I can put my nose to any copy of the book Spring which we made together there, and its scent will take me to Marilyn’s studio.

Marilyn will also require a digital camera in Heaven. She reveled in documenting everything that interested her, and Marilyn was interested in just about everything. She photographed her travels, her grandchildren, flowers, and other things that most people would consider worthy, but she also loved to photograph meals she was about to eat, things she saw from airplane windows, textures—anything she needed to share, she took a picture of it. If I am ever allowed to visit her in Heaven, I am sure she will whip out a massive deck of photographs and show me all the meals she’s eaten there and outer space views of the Earth.

For Marilyn’s entertainment (while she waits for the rest of us to join her) I would send her operas, bakelite bracelets, gingerbread houses, art museums, trees, cookbooks, a bicycle, and a garden full of flax, mulberry, cotton, and other diverse plants to make paper (in the Papermakers’ Heaven these things can all grow contentedly together). Because she was extraordinarily absorbed in the doings of her family, friends, and students, I would arrange for messages to be sent to Marilyn regularly, perhaps via fortune cookies:

• Your grandchildren are finger-painting.
• One of your favorite students won a MacArthur Fellowship.
• Your friend is remembering how beautiful you looked in your Chinese red dress. • Someone is looking at a piece of your art.
• Many of your fellow papermakers are holding their copies of this magazine, thinking of you, imagining you happy in the Papermakers’ Heaven.

—Audrey Niffenegger