Radha Pandey is a papermaker and letterpress printer. She earned her MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book where she studied Letterpress printing, Bookbinding, and Papermaking with a focus on Western, Eastern and Indo-Islamic Papermaking techniques. Her artist’s books are held in numerous public collections, she has lectured and taught workshops on Indo-Islamic papermaking around the world, and she is currently working on an artists book inspired by Mughal miniature paintings of botanicals from the 17th century. Radha splits her time between India, where she grew up and Norway, where she and her partner Johan Solberg run Halden Bookworks.

We talked the first handmade paper Pandey saw as a child, which was brought to her from Japan by her mother, a puppeteer.

Pandey is an expert in Indo-Islamic papermaking, which she teaches and lectures about.

Her artist’s books are in collections around the world.

We discussed her unique watermark animations, which you can watch here.

This is the papermaking studio at Halden Bookworks.

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Radha Pandey’s recommendations:

• Burnishing bone tools from Jim Croft
• When Pandey doesn’t have time to make it, she buys paper from other papermakers, such as Andrea Peterson of Hook Pottery Paper and the Morgan Conservatory.

Visit Radha Pandey’s website to learn more about her work. You can also find her on instagram @pandey.radha, @haldenbookworks