Paper Talk

Velma Bolyard is a mother, artist and teacher. Living north of the Adirondacks, she forages for and cultivates fibers, dye and papermaking plants. She makes paper, threads, spins kami-ito, weaves shifu, and fish skin parchment, and she spins and cultivates wild silks for her artists’ books. A papermaker since 1977, her specialty is local plant papers and flax, which she colors with plants and earth pigments. She delightsin edges, selvedges, deckles, and ecotones where the woods meet open land; that is also where she finds the material and stories for her work. Small adventures and stories show up as poems in...

Born in Virginia, Chauncey Foster is an experiential artist whose work explores the intersection of collective action, environmental philosophy, and applied ecology. He studied Biology at St. Andrews University and has since worked extensively in ecology, conservation, and outdoor education. He currently works alongside Noah Mertz at we.grow.eco, a Northern New Mexico nonprofit that uses art, science, and hands-on education to explore our relationships with waste, consumption, and the environment. A central part of Chauncey’s practice focuses on textile waste management, transforming discarded clothing and fibers into handmade paper, books, and other functional and artistic materials. Th...

Katie MacGregor entered into the world of production papermaking in 1980, when she was invited to do an apprenticeship at Twinrocker Handmade Paper.  She never looked back, and built a cottage industry in her studio, which is located in Whiting, ME.  She’s been working for and collaborating with book artists, private presses, bookbinders and conservators in public institutions for the past 46 years. In 2022, Katie was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award by the Guild of Bookworkers.

Angela Fung and Ashley Bedford run Fung & Bedford, a multi-disciplinary studio exploring how material can think, hold memory, and reshape space. Through large-scale folded sculptures and installations, they transform flat surfaces into structural form, using geometry and repetition to give gesture a tangible presence.

Their process is guided as much by gravity as by resistance to it. They test the threshold between weight and lift, creating forms that appear suspended — poised between ascent and collapse.

To Fung & Bedford, folding is both action and a philosophy — a way to ‘Unfold the Moment’. Each work emerges th...

Bernie Vinzani has a Master of Fine Arts degree in printmaking from Indiana State University. He was a papermaker at Twinrocker Paper, and since the early 1980’s he has made book and conservation papers in his shop in Whiting, Maine.  He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, and has made paper for the Library of Congress, Harvard University Libraries and has collaborated with many artists and fine book printers.

Jaz Graf's recent body of work juxtaposes synthetic and raw materials, the virtual gaze with organic imprints, and satellite imagery with dust. It sets in motion, a contemporary discourse around intergenerational memory and cultural preservation. Graf exhibits locally and internationally, was most recently featured at The Newark Museum of Art, NJ and published in the peer-reviewed journal, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Her work has appeared in Whitehot Magazine, AM New York News, The Jersey Journal, World Literature Today and on NJ PBS Television Network.

Amanda Thackray is a multidisciplinary ecofeminist artist-educator based in Newark, NJ, who crafts intricate artwork exploring the intersections between nature, industry, and human experience. She is the recipient of several Creative Catalyst Fund Fellowships, a Puffin Foundation Grant for Environmental Art, and a NJ State Council Individual Artist Fellowship. Residencies include The Arctic Circle, Norway; The Center for Book Arts, NYC; and The Museum of Art and Design, NYC. Her work has been widely exhibited and is held in numerous international public and private collections including The Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Mediatheque Andre...

Jim Patterson is a life-long papermaker and owner of Two Rivers Paper since 1986. Two Rivers Paper specialises in hand-made rag papers, using traditional methods, each sheet being carefully crafted one by one. After many years of production in a water and solar powered mill, Two Rivers is now situated at East Quay Arts Centre in Watchet, Somerset, UK.

Doug Beube is a mixed-media artist working across numerous disciplines, including bookwork, collage, installation, sculpture, and photography. He holds a BFA from York University in Toronto, ON, and an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. He lectures and exhibits internationally and is the subject of the monograph Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex (2011). Beube received a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship in 2016 and served as curator of the Allan Chasanoff Bookwork Collection from 1993 to 2014, culminating in an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT. His work has been exhibited internationally – in China, New Zealand, and across Eur...

Lyndal Thorne is an arts administrator with a passion for grassroots arts activity and coordinator of the biennial Paper on Skin Wearable Art Competition, which launched in Burnie, Tasmania in 2012. She is also President of stARTs North-West (formerly Burnie Arts Council Inc) and recently retired as the chair of Slipstream Circus after three years tenure in the role. During 2024 she undertook a 12-month role as Regional Community Engagement Officer for RANT Arts (a peak regional arts advocacy body based in Northern Tasmania).

Mia Semingson received her MFA in photography and electronic media from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, and France as well as nationally. Mia taught photography and book arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder for twelve years. She and her husband Gerald Trainor have owned Two Hands Paperie since January 2010, where their goal is to foster a community of creative people and support artists and other small businesses. Mia loves teaching and, in addition to her workshops at Two Hands, has taught for the Makerie,  Anderson Ranch Art...

John Risseeuw received his BS, MA, and MFA degrees in printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in1968, 1972, and 1973, respectively. Risseeuw is Emeritus Professor of Art at Arizona State University where he taught printmaking, book arts, and papermaking from 1980 to 2015. He directed the Pyracantha Press, founded in 1982 as the book arts imprint of ASU; his own Cabbagehead Press was founded in 1972. His prints, books, and collaborative works have been exhibited and collected widely. The Library of Congress has purchased all of his books and works on paper. He was founding president of the College Book Art Association and has served...

John Babcock lives and works at his studio near Santa Cruz,California, where he creates works using primarily paper as his medium. His work has been shown in over thirty major art museums in the United States and Europe. Most recently, his work was included in Contemporary Crafts at the Mesa Art Museum and the Shanghai Paper Art Biennale in Shanghai, China. 

In addition to exhibiting his work, Babcock has lectured and conducted workshops throughout the United States and internationally, including sessions at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio, Texas; the Universityof Wisconsin; t...

Tran Hong Nhung is the founder of Zo Project, a social enterprise, which preserves, supports, and expands Vietnamese traditional paper and papermaking techniques in a sustainable and creative way.

Zó Paper is run by  a dynamic young team who wish to bringtraditional values into contemporary society. In return, their profits are going back into the community of papermakers by creating job opportunities and a stable income for an ethnic minority village in the Northern province of Vietnam.

Denise Jill Marshall runs Blue Skies Above Photography. As a landscape photographer for more than 45 years, her recent work has focused on weaving her photographs, using many different types of photographic printing paper to create new ways for light to interact with image. Through deconstruction. she is able to create a new whole, in her art and in herself. Marshall is motivated by light, color, and the feelings a subject evokes. She often attends photography workshops, where she captures the unique architecture, water, and colors of the places she travels, as well as the surrounding areas in Bucks County...

Lee McDonald is a papermaker with a long history of making tools. He has been involved with paper for over 5 decades, starting in the early years of Twinrocker Handmade Paper, and then moving on to making custom moulds, followed by building beaters, presses, and papermaking dryers. His future projects include ensuring how techniques and tools will be available in the future. McDonald is currently working on personal paper projects in his No Name Yet Paper Mill, along with making the mill available to artists – reach out if you’re in the Boston area.

Naomi J. Kendall is an artist based in Somerset in the UK. She completed a Foundation Course at Cheltenham School of Art, pursued a degree in Art History at Leicester University and received a postgraduate diploma at Manchester University in Gallery and Museum Studies. After a career working in galleries and running community arts projects, she returned to making her own work. In 2022 she was the Evolver Magazine Prize winner, she’s a member of the Paper Artist Collective and is featured as a master artisan in the Michelangelo Foundation’s Homo Faber Guide. In 2024, she was accepted as a mem...

Originally from Mexico City, via California, and South Carolina, Paulina Johnson has been immersed in the fields of art and graphic design for over 20 years. She received a joint BFA from the Academy of Art University and the University of San Francisco in 1999. In 2017, she earned an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  Paulina has been an ongoing educator and is currently an exhibiting partner at Pine Moon Fine Art in Steamboat Springs, CO. She lives and works in beautiful Steamboat where she enjoys the mountains with her husband, two growing boys and their pup Murray.

Carole Kunstadt's works often invoke a metaphysical quality. They reference antique books, music manuscripts, maps and artifacts - deconstructing paper and text and using it in metaphorical ways. Through the manipulation of the materials – history, memory and time merge in a hybrid form.

Born in Boston, Kunstadt spent her childhood in a small New England town, received a BFA from the Hartford Art School in Hartford, Connecticut, and continued with postgraduate studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany.

Twelve years ago she re-entered a familiar landscape as in her yout...

Dorothy McGuinness is a contemporary basket weaver who lives and works in Everett, Washington. She took her first basketmaking class in 1987 and has studied basket-weaving techniques that have been handed down through the centuries. Dorothy has worked extensively with Jiro Yonezawa, a contemporary Japanese basket maker and teacher. She discovered her medium of choice in 2000, when she took a workshop with Jackie Abrams, who introduced her to watercolor paper as a basket-weaving material. She now works exclusively in diagonal twills and mad weave, creating contemporary sculptural baskets, and enjoys exploring the interplay of weaving, color, and design in her...

Matt LaBoone is an origami artist and papermaker in Orlando, Florida, who has a focus on folding and designing insects as origami subjects, and has developed thin and crisp paper especially suited for folding them. Over the years, LaBoone has found that most commercially available papers, and even many origami specific papers are not well suited for what he likes to design and fold, which is what led him to pursue papermaking.

For many origami folders it can be challenging to learn what paper is suitable for what folds and to understand the papermaking process. LaBoone de-mystifies p...

Galen Gibson-Cornell was born and raised in Maryville, Missouri and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking from Truman State University in 2009, (which included a 2007 study-abroad in Angers, France). He completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Wisconsin in 2013 and then set off on a year-long Fulbright fellowship to Budapest, Hungary. In the following years, Gibson-Cornell traveled to multiple international artist-residency programs, developing a creative practice based on urban exploration and repurposing found materials. His studio has been based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 2017.

Founded nearly 30 years ago by paper designer Marianne Guély, Studio Marianne Guély is an exceptional creative atelier at the crossroads of art, design, and craftsmanship. Specialising in the poetic staging of paper, the studio conjures up immersive worlds where imagination is reignited and stories come to life. Internationally acclaimed, the studio weaves tales and visual narratives that awaken the senses and transport the viewer, sculpting the ephemeral to transform it into a moment of eternity. Each creation is a breath — a suspended instant. Paper, a living material, enters into dialogue with space and imagination alike. Operating within the...

Cynthia Nourse Thompson is a Professor and the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University. Prior to this position, for six years she was Associate Professor and Director of the graduate programs in Book Arts & Printmaking and Studio Art at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA. She has also served as Associate Professor and Curator of Exhibitions at University of Arkansas; twelve years as Professor of Book, Print and Paper Arts and Chair of Fine Arts at Memphis College of Art; and additionally worked at Dieu Donné Papermill, Harlan & Weaver Intaglio a...

James Ojascastro is an origamist, papermaker, and botanist, with a Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Washington University in St. Louis in collaboration with the Missouri BotanicalGarden. Ojascastro employs a combination of methods – including fiber trait measurements, experimental papermaking, species distribution modeling, andsemistructured interviews – to explore the history, biogeography, and conservation of papermaking traditions (especially of Nepal and Vietnam) through a botanical lens. Outside of academia, Ojascastro uses his researchbackground to guide and inform what plants and which processes will yield paper suitable for origami art.

Authors and artists Lynn Sures and Michelle Samour talk about their new book, Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp. A landmark book that profiles an artistic movement that has operated largely outside the mainstream art world, this book serves as both an overdue history and up-close look at the range, versatility, and brilliance of art created with colored paper pulp.

Rachel Singel is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisville. Singel grew up on a small farm in Charlottesville, Virginia and received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 2009 and a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2013. She has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Art Print Residence in Barcelona, Spain, Wharepuke Print Studios in New Zealand, Proyecto'ace, an Artist-in-Residence Program in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and AGA Lab in the Netherlands. She has studied non-toxic printmaking at the...

Darryl Bedford, an Australian artist and innovator, is redefining the possibilities of paper. Blending traditional origami with cutting-edge digital design, he crafts intricate, kinetic sculptures that challenge our perception of this humble material. Born in Perth, Australia, and now based in London. Darryl is a teacher, Apple Distinguished Educator, trauma-informed practitioner, and paper engineer. His passion for paper extends beyond aesthetics; he believes in its therapeutic potential, using it to connect individuals with the natural world and promote well-being.

Catherine Lucky Chang is an artist, art educator, and yoga teacher based in Palo Alto, CA whose work combines papermaking, printmaking, and painting. Born in Atlanta, GA, she holds a BS from Skidmore College and an MFA from the University of Georgia. Chang’s practice is an exploration of inner peace, wholeness, and joy. Her abstract works on her own handmade paper range from small and intimate to large-scale and immersive. Through intuitive, spontaneous marks, Chang melds line, shape, and color to evoke presence and vitality.

Michelle Samour a multi-media artist whose work explores the intersections between science, technology, and the natural world, as well as the socio-political repercussions of redefining borders and boundaries. Samour has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Tufts European Center in Talloires, France; and an Artist-in-Residence at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine; The Banff Centre in Canada; and at other institutions. Samour’s has exhibited her work at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachussetts; the Museum of Modern Art in Strasbourg, France; and the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI; and at many other venues. Her wo...

Joanna Gair is a multifaceted visual artist and papermaker, living and working in Devonport, Northwest Tasmania.  After graduating with a first-class degree in Visual Art from the South Australian School of Art, in 1993, she established her studio in North-west Scotland in 1999, since then, she has blended her skills as a visual artist with the ancient craft of papermaking, forging a career marked by creativity, innovation, and sustainability. In 2004, Joanna made a pivotal transition to North-west Tasmania, assuming the roles of manager and creative director at Australia's largest handmade paper mill in Burnie. Here, she embarked on a mission to e...

Shanna Leino is a studio artist with a fascination for the many forms of the book. After eight years in beautiful Frankfort, Michigan, she has returned to her home state of New Hampshire. She works in her studio, manufactures a small line of hand tools for bookbinders and craftspeople, and travels throughout the U.S. and occasionally abroad, teaching book and toolmaking workshops.

Nancy Jacobi is  the Founder of The Japanese Paper Place in Toronto, a business which she began 40 + years ago after her discovery of paper’s potential while teaching English in Japan. By supplying washi worldwide, offering workshops, lectures and exhibitions, the company continues its mission to encourage creativity by highlighting the potential of this too little-understood, powerful but endangered resource.

Paul Denhoed is a paper researcher and papermaker, originally from Toronto, Canada. After receiving a Japanese Government Scholarship to study Japanese hand papermaking, he has been living and working in Japan for more than 20 years. He has worked at Oguni Washi as a production papermaker and taught papermaking, bookmaking, and art history at Asia University. He currently works closely with Imai Hiroaki of Oguni Washi in Niigata on production papermaking projects and in-depth papermaking workshops. He also offers papermaking and bookbinding workshops at universities and schools in the Tokyo area, and works with a group to maintain a kozo...

Skye Tafoya is an indigenous artist from the eastern band cherokee and santa clara pueblo tribes. Her tribal heritage and lineage are significant components that are continuously present within her artwork. Tafoya comes from a lineage of basket-weavers, both paternal and maternal, and also used to make red willow baskets with her dad, and she continues to use paper-weaving processes to honor her loved ones and ancestors. Her meticulously crafted designs, patterns, prints, and weavings are influenced by basketry and contain themes of cultural teachings, cherokee language preservation, motherhood and personal & family narratives. Tafoya creates with the intention of...

Joyce Gold is a Denver, Colorado artist who pushes the boundaries of traditional papermaking to create works in paper that are new and innovative. Her work is said to “punctuate the depth and breadth of papermaking.” Joyce uses various plant fibers with assorted papermaking techniques and markings to accentuate her work, and her love of the papermaking process piques her curiosity and leads to new discoveries. Gold’s work has been widely exhibited; she is the recipient of awards from D’Art Gallery, Arnold Grummers, and the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory; and her work has been featured in Fiber Ar...

Emily Martin has produced more than fifty artist’s books, often using movable and/or sculptural paper engineering techniques. Martin’s books are included in public and private collections throughout the world, and she has received grants and residencies from the College Book Arts Association, the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and the Bodleian Bibliographical Press in Oxford, England among others.  Martin has two adult daughters and lives in Iowa City, IA with her Vandercook SP15 printing press. She rides her bicycle as often as she can, sometimes all the way across the state of Iowa.

Roberto Benavidez is a sculptor specializing in the piñata form. Benavidez worked in metal-casting first, but then began longing for more accessible materials and switched to paper. His piñata forms play with the underlying themes of race and sin innate in the piñata, layered with his identity as a mixed-race queer artist, with a focus on impeccable craftsmanship. Benavidez’s sculptures have been featured in national, international and on-line publications, including ARTnews, Artsy, Atlas Obscura, hifructose.com, Hyperallergic, Politiken, The Guardian, The New York Times and This Is Colossal.  He has exhibited his work in numerous group a...

Megumi Inouye is a gift wrapping and packaging artist. Known for her sustainable wrapping designs and creative innovations, she encourages repurposing, utilizing everyday things around us and using organic and recyclable items. She attributes her passion for gift wrapping to her Japanese heritage and the cultural values that underlie the meaning behind the art of giving. Her new book, The Soul of Giftwrapping, features creative techniques for expressing gratitude, both literally and figuratively.

Beth Kephart, a National Book Award finalist, is the award-winning author of some 40 books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher of memoir, a widely published essayist, and a women who loves paper. Her new book is My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press).