What a great pleasure to meet the papermakers and presenters this weekend at the Dard Hunter Conference in Santa Fe. The New Mexico History Museum was a beautiful setting for demonstrations, tables of beautiful papers from Helen Hiebert, Madeleine Durham, Andrea Peterson, and Cave Papers as well as book arts of Donna and Peter Thomas, and the craftsmanship of Jim Croft. I was especially happy to meet Lisa Miles who began book arts and papermaking at Santa Fe Community College and now is at the University of Iowa finishing up her graduate degree in Book Arts. She was a presenter about her studies of amatyl papers from Mexico and I saw her very beautiful books that used amatyl, letterpress, and pressure printing of corn husks. It is exciting to see the connections and art that grow from the talent in our classroom at SFCC.
I also visited the show of Marilyn Chambers and Patricia Pearce at the Rotunda with my book arts students last week. What a wonderful presentation of materials in a range of highly personal formats that are uniquely merged with found structures. Just great to see and be inspired to keep one's eyes open to all the beauty around us in objects as they age.
At the conference I also met Lauren Pearlman from the Paperconnection. Her warehouse of beautiful Asian papers is located in Providence, R.I. and we talked about the wonderful teachers in the Graphic Arts Department at Rhode Island School of Design. I graduated from RISD in 2004 and did an accordian book, "Walk, Run." I'm posting it here. The images were from old photos of me as a child, enlarged images of handwriting and printed images from documents and index cards, and used shoes as iconic markers of time sequence. I did this book in Jan Baker's class and I have taught many of the methods of suminigashi, paste paper, pop-ups and sewn books that I learned with her. One of my former students, Madeleine Durham, now has a wonderful paste paper business and her papers are so beautiful they become art in themselves. Check out her website https://madeleinedurham.com/for inspiration. She's been invited to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to give a talk about her work. Isn't it great thinking how a bit of wheat paste and teaching has traveled!
This book is a timeline of my growth as an artist. It uses shoes as icons of time. Printmaking methods are transfer print, monoprint and plate lithography. Handwriting is from an old index card enlarged 800%.