Have Abaca, Will Travel

The Sunday Paper #260
May 19, 2019

Paper of the Week: High Shrinkage Abaca

Here’s a photo of a collection of pieces in progress made from high shrinkage abaca. This fiber will never cease to amaze me, and I had a fun weekend sharing my love with a group in Boulder (read on).

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Out of the Studio

Last weekend I was in Boulder, teaching a workshop to members of the Handweavers Guild of Boulder. What a great group! The guild is over 50 years old, and they have a full week of activities every month, including meetings, a workshop and lectures. When they invited me, I thought I’d teach paper weaving, but they wanted to do papermaking. With all of the prepping and shlepping involved, I don’t take my papermaking show on the road very much these days. But high shrinkage abaca proved to be a suitable travel companion. My prius was packed to the gills with prepared pulp, buckets, Arnold Grummer’s moulds & deckles + their press, vats, pellons, and more. You get the picture! The workshop was held in the classroom area of a yarn shop, which was perfect, and we didn’t even get the mop out once.

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Papery Tidbits:

The Salzburg Residency in Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University looks like a good one!
Have you listened to my podcast interview with Nancy Cohen?
What do you think of paper mache? Take a look at these bumpy little plant-like creations.

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PaperLove is an online ecourse with the lovely Rachel Hazell, whom I interviewed on Paper Talk a few months ago. Click through to find instructions for a Five Minute Artist Book and get a taste for the kind of things you will learn in the PaperLove ecourse. If you decide to sign up, enter the code NEWIDEAS. As a reader of The Sunday Paper, you will receive a 10% discount! This ecourse begins June 17th.

If you are in Charleston, SC, this looks like an amazing show. The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art presents a solo exhibition by Jennifer Wen Ma that investigates the history and social landscape of Charleston, including a series of community dinners featuring performances and guided conversations. I love this description: “One must then push through a flower portal reminiscent of a botanical birth canal, emerging from darkness into the garden of light.”

(Image Courtesy of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art)

I was delighted to find a new (to me) source for handmade paper wedding invitations and other paper paraphernalia at the tail end of this article, which contains lots of pics of her product! Share Studios, run by Stephanie Hare, is located in Philadelphia and her website is lovely too. The writer did a lovely job of crediting all of the people involved – you can even find out about the calligrapher, printer, and where they got their wax seals and special stamps (and so much more).

I thoroughly enjoyed Anderson Cooper’s interview with Mark Bradford on 60 Minutes, about his life and his work with paper.

Artist Mark Bradford shows Anderson Cooper one of his pieces

I also found this paper performance by Aïdée Bernard calming and beautiful.

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Featured this week in my Studio shop: LandEscape, The Papermaker’s Companion the Twelve Months of Paper Calendar (now 1/2 price) and info about Paper Weaving.

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