The Sunday Paper #325

August 16, 2020

Introducing…!

Andrew Huot, Karen Hardy, and Linda Marshall are launching Book | Paper | Thread — a source for online workshops in the book and paper arts. The three instructors, who have been teaching in-person across the country at arts centers, universities, and in their own studios, have moved their workshops to an online format so participants can learn at home or in their own studio. Their first courses include an Introduction to Bookbinding, Transforming Japanese Paper with Konnyaku, Ready, Set, Fold, and Preservation Enclosures.

Course content will be presented as video demonstrations with accompanying PDF instructions for each of the projects, accessible online anytime during the course. Participants have access to a discussion forum to ask questions about processes and to share successes. Some classes will include live office hours webinars on the course website. Participants have the opportunity to purchase a kit of materials for each project or find their own from the supplied materials and tools list.

Join the Book | Paper | Thread mailing list (reference the Sunday Paper in the Questions/Comments section) by next Sunday (8/23) when they will select one new subscriber to receive a paper pack from each of the three instructors.

Papermaker of the Week: Jackie Radford

This is a new column. If you’re a papermaker and would like to be featured in the coming weeks and months, please fill out this form. I’d love to hear from you!

© Jackie Radford “Exposed” 8.5×11 cotton rag paper, watermark. Watermarks are unseen until exposed to the light. This body of work responds to current country-wide unrest, as civil rights issues are exposed to the light.

The first papers that Jackie Radford fell in love with had botanical inclusions in them. Each sheet of paper had a speckling of natural mementos from someone’s garden. Every little bit of leaf, stalk, and petal told a story about a patch of dirt. Those papers ignited her relationship with papermaking. Today, she makes paper in her North Carolina studio tucked in the back of her own patch of dirt, and bits of leaf, stalk, and petal tell her story. Radford is in constant conversation with her medium. She pushes it until it protests and then they chat about what they can do in that tension. She’s working with cotton rag now. “What happens when I under-beat? Over-beat? Use cheap fabric? Mix blends of flimsy and robust fabric?” Try it and see what happens” is a guiding principle in her practice.

In the Studio: A Sheet of Abaca Comes to Life

Remember that online paper sale? THANK YOU to those of you who placed orders! I am busy making those abaca sheets. I’m pretty fast, but this is slow papermaking – if you’ve worked with abaca, you know that it drains slowly. I made a short video that shows the creation of a sheet of abaca, from fiber to finished sheet. Guess how thick a stack of 44 sheets of super thin abaca is? You’ll find out at the end of the video! And for those of you who placed an order, they are shipping out as I finish them, and everything will ship by the end of August.

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Karla Funderburk started making cranes three months ago, hanging them in her art gallery. She soon realized that she wasn’t going to be able to keep up with her goal – to exhibit a crane for each of those who have died in the U.S. of COVID-19 – by making 10 cranes each night. On May 14th, the number of deaths ticked to 88,000 and she realized it would take her 24 years to complete them and she asked for help. Now volunteers drop off scores of the elegantly made paper cranes every day.

A Tribute to Tradition, a touring exhibition on contemporary paper art, is currently on view in Beijing. More than 120 contemporary Chinese paper artworks, spanning from paper-cutting and installation to sculpture and relief, are on display at the Shandong Art Museum in Ji’nan before they travel to Shenyang, Xi’an, and Wuhan.

Artist Wang Weiwei’s paper statue Expect, made from a blend of pulp and ink, is on show at the Today Art Museum in Beijing on July 25, 2020. [Photo by Yang Xiaoyu/chinadaily.com.cn]

Spencer Little’s nestled sculptures are on view through September 20 at MOAH: CEDAR in Lancaster, CA. Illumination Devices is comprised of the artist’s bent portraits and totems of merging faces, in addition to a series of irradiated kinetic sculptures. Each lamp is formed from a welded metal body that is covered with a thin paper “skin.”

© Spencer Little, “Large Orange Lamp” (2020), steel, paper, glue, red heartwood, gears, electric motors, sprockets, bicycle chain link, 40 × 80 × 40 inches. As seen on Colossal.

I enjoyed this article with the premise of books still having lots to offer as libraries go digital.

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Featured this week in my Studio shop: Try It, Woven Paper Lantern online class (self study), The Papermaker’s Package, Water Paper Time & The Papermaker’s Companion.

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