Autonomous Progression

My autonomous drying experiments continue - here's a few shots of the progression of one piece, not exactly from start to finish, but it gives an idea of the dramatic changes that happen as the piece dries.

Many of the artists at SVP who see me working on these are completely surprised at how they end up, so I wanted to show that yes, they do start out flat. It's the fiber that warps them into their form. The finished pieces really should be viewed in the round; they look like completely different pieces from one side to another.

I'll be sharing this process, and other sculptural paper techniques in my upcoming class in January!

In other news, the Rhinoceros Project continues!

Papermaking again in Half Moon Bay

A few weekends ago, I returned to Half Moon Bay again for a workshop at Judy's space. (See previous years here and here). This time we did Japanese Style Papermaking. Above, you can see the participants trying out beating the fiber (with my lovely hammer from Andrea!)

Above, John and Robert practice the nagashizuki shake, while Nicky looks on. Nicky took some great photos and video from the day, check them out on Instagram here.

After lunch, I talked about inclusions, and people went wild. Below is Nicky's, and I love how he manages to make something feel calligraphic, even with thread.

Despite being exhausted from the workshop, and installing a show the day before (images to come), I had heard from Judy about the humpback whales that were feeding at Miramar, and didn't want to pass up the chance to see them close up - or, as close as you can get from shore. They were tricky to photograph, but mind-blowing to see. There were also several hundred pelicans.

I'm given to understand that due to the changes caused by global warming, whales are venturing closer and closer to shore to find food sources, so there was a tinge of sadness in seeing this pod. However, at the same time, it was a magical end to the day.

Banff Recollections

I've been enjoying my holiday break, catching up on some studio projects and starting a few new ones. The piece above is an in-process shot of the center panel of a print triptych I'm working on, based on my experience at Banff for the Dard Hunter Conference. The final piece will be a series of reduction linoleum blocks on handmade paper with pulp paint - the blue in the image above is actually a pulp paint stencil.

As the print progresses, I find myself remembering not only the mountains there, but the studios as well, and the integration between inside and outside as an artist's space.

All the studios at Banff either have skylights or large windows that look out towards the mountains. Even the studios for individual artists. It was so bright that the view from the windows in this pictures is overexposed, but the mountains are there.

The print shop is divided into multiple rooms. Below, the screen print area:

The screen print area is part of a long room that also houses the etching area, divided by some enclosed rooms for screen exposure and for acid. Along one side are windows that bring the light and mountains in.

I loved this guide to their ink colors:

A door in the etching area leads to the litho room:

Passing through the litho room leads to letterpress:

Next to letterpress is a clean room that can serve as a bindery or print curating space, which I neglected to photograph. Off of that room is the digital printshop - please excuse the slight blurriness.

The paper studio is in the basement. Radha Pandey was doing an Islamic papermaking demo during the tour, I'll dedicate a post to that soon.

The beater room.

The studio building is built into the side of the mountain. In the paper studio, there is still one wall of windows, but on the other side of the room, the mountain literally comes into the studio.

Raw fibers, half stuff, linters, and odds and ends on the wall of the paper studio:

The print and paper studios are coordinated by Wendy Tokaryk, whose work I was fortunate to see while in Banff.

This is just the studios I saw. The entire three days was so full of energy and revelation, it would be too long a post, so I will have to share the rest in other posts.

Making Paper at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens

I was fortunate to teach Papermaking from Plants last week at the Berkeley Botanical Garden, as part of their Fiber and Dye programming. For the class, I decided to prepare some fibers that grown locally, so participants could learn how to make paper from their very own gardens. I also invited participants to bring plants from home, and asked the garden for any cuttings they could spare.

One of the fibers I prepared was yucca - that's what's beating in Dulcinea above. It's from my yucca plant that I grew in Richmond - you can see it in the picture here - that I'd harvested and dried before we moved. Winnie had warned me that the fiber would foam in the beater, but I didn't realize how much it it would foam! Even dried, the fibers were full of saponins.

Below, the beaten fiber, still sudsy.

I posted a picture of the suds to Facebook, and I think some people found it pretty gross. However, I found the suds almost like a luxurious bubble bath, and I was so enchanted I decided to write about it for Mary's "Eat Your Words" zine.

Every time I do a class like this, the prep exhausts me and I wonder if its worth it. Then I teach the class, and watch how people are transformed by making plant matter into paper, and realize it totally is. I've been thinking about how making paper from local fibers connects people to place, and how paper from local plants has what I think of as hereness - the sense of the landscape in the very fibers.

Along with the yucca, I prepared New Zealand Flax (which really isn't flax, it's phormium), daylily, and corn husk, and during the class we coaked and blendered some pampas grass leaves. It was so, so , so great to teach people how to make paper from scratch from their own gardens.

We started out with everyone making a sheet of each of the fibers from the pure botanical, and then added a little abaca so that we didn't run out too soon.

It was a full class, with very enthusiastic participants. The garden also gave us some banana cuttings, which we didn't get to, but they let me take them home.

Below, Lisa experimented with incorporating fresh plant matter into her paper.

I had been pouring our waste paper onto the plants, and took the press outside to press, hoping the water would drain into the garden - but then was chagrined to learn that the plants were under controlled watering conditions for study. Oops.

We went through almost all the pulp, and I let Christine take the remainder home - she used it up right away.

We ended the workshop with the pampas grass paper - completing the cycle of plant to paper in a day. We didn't have enough for everyone to make a sheet of pure pampas, so it was a pampas grass-abaca mix. All of my prepared fibers has been dried, so the bright green of the fresh fiber excited the participants and felt to me like the grand finale of the workshop.

Tomorrow I return to Half Moon Bay to teach at Judy's again!

In other exciting news, I've been invited by the San Francisco Center for the Book to make a book for their 2015 Small Plates Imprint! I'm going to work with a variation on the flag book structure.

I was also selected for Creative Capital's "On Our Radar" program!

Upcoming Workshops for 2015

Papermaking with Plants
MARCH 22 BERKELEY BOTANICAL GARDENS
10 AM - 4 PM
$80 members/$85 non-members
Contact for more information: Mary Mworka, gardenprograms@berkeley.edu

Learn to make art from your own garden! No experience neccessary. This class will discuss the basics of harvesting, cooking, and processing plants and forming into sheets of handmade paper. We will use some plants from the Botonical Gardens themselves, and participants are welcome to bring in contributions from their home gardens as well. You’ll never look at your garden the same way again!
To register, please visit here.


Hand Papermaking and Pulp Painting
9:30 AM - 4:30 PM
March 28, Kitsune Community Art Studios, Half Moon Bay, CA
Cost: $85 Covers class fee and all materials
Contact for more information, or to register: Judy Shintani, judyshintani@yahoo.com

Learn the basics of making handmade paper in the European tradition. Students will the basics, from dry fiber to sheet formation, as well as techniques for embellishing bare sheets into works of art using a technique called Pulp Painting. Pulp painting uses finely beaten paper pulp that can act almost like paint to make brilliant imagery in handmade paper. When dried, the painting is an actual part of the paper, which can stand alone or be transformed further through drawing, printing, traditional painting, or whatever you can think of for a mixed media creation. This class will cover various pulp painting techniques including direct painting, stencils, collage inclusions, and other means of pulp-based mark-making. Techniques for making paper at home will also be discussed. Students will leave the workshop will a number of their own wet papers that will dry at home. No prior experience necessary.

To see images of previous workshops at Kitsune Community Studio, please visit here.


Hand Papermaking and Pulp Painting
1-5 PM
April 4, Rocinante Press, Oakland, CA
Cost: $80, covers materials and class fee
Offered through ExchangeWorks
For more information, or to register, please visit ExchangeWorks.

A class simliar to the one offered in Half Moon Bay, in Oakland, CA. Follow the link to ExchangeWorks to register.

Roadworks 2014

A belated post on the San Francisco Center for the Book's Roadworks Event! For those who may be unfamiliar, this is their annual event in which they invite a few select artists to make 3'x 3' linoleum block prints. These prints are then printed by steamroller at their public event, using the street itself as a press bed, and later sold to support the center.

I met my husband at a similar event, so it's was a pretty nostalgic day for me. This year, the center used a vintage steamroller that actually ran off of coal.

I'm always impressed by how organized the event is - teams of orange-shirt clad volunteers are divided into "clean hands" and "inky hands," so one team lays down and collects the block, while a another lays down the paper and pulls the print.

The event is also a street fair, with artists and organizations peddling their wares, and opportunities for people to try their hand at art activities, such as block carving, or papermaking! Papermaking was offered by the Mobile Mill, and it was my first time seeing it in action.

I was particularly impressed with the organization of the mill - storage for molds and deckles and pellon built right into the beater table. Although part of me questions the carbon footprint of a traveling workshop in this day and age, I think it's still pretty exciting, and anything that spreads the papermaking gospel has merit.

If you want to support the San Francisco Center for the Book by purchasing one of the prints, please visit here. You can also explore their website of which offers all sorts of classes, exhibitions and events.

Geeking out

I've been unabashedly geeking out on some interesting and great papermaking stuff online. First of all, this website, Papeles con Marca al Agua (Papers with Watermarks), is a great collection of watermarks online. It's where I found the image above. Text is only in Spanish, but you can peruse the images without a fluency. Check out these!

Two great blogs on papermaking that I have been reading are Paperslurry (written by May Babcock) and The Fiber Wire: Plugged in and Turned On. Full disclosure, Paperslurry has featured my work before - most recently here (!), but previously here. Both blogs feature not only papermaking, but historic insights and contemporary roles of paper, such as this recent post on The Fiber Wire on the new $100 Bill.

May Babcock is the coiner of the word "pulptype," a form of combining pulp painting with monotypes. Very similar to what we did at Magnolia here, read her talking about her practice here.

Finally, I discovered the Youtube videos series by the Hermitage and Matanhongo Heritage Center. They have a whole series of videos on processing flax. The brothers there, Christian and Johannes Zinzendorf, are also the authors of The Big Book of Flax, which has been on my wishlist for a while now, although I haven't had the money to splurge yet.

The videos go beyond just how to process, but also some of the history and comparative methods of processing from various part of the Western world. Check out the video below on breaking flax:



Scutching:



Combing:

SGCI 2014 Photos

March was also so busy due to the Southern Graphics Council International Conference here in SF. I was on the Steering Committee, in charge of the Vendor Fair. We had 60 vendors, from the USA, Canada, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and France.

During the event, I met the gentleman who had been in charge of the fair for 25 years. When he started, the fair had six vendors.

Click on photos for a larger view.

Below, Conrad Machine company helps convert another printmaker:

Wee little barrens for sale at Graphic Chemical!

Maddy Rosenberg of CENTRAL BOOKING at the fair:

An intriguing vendor, Halfwood Press. Elegantly built, and you could plug in a USB into some models.

The second evening of the conference, the Friends of Dard Hunter had a meetup in the hotel bar. As the photographer, I'm not in this picture, but you can see Eli, Rhiannon, Rebecca, Jen, Peter, and Colin. Not pictured, but John and Anne were also in attendance.

I didn't get to attend as many panels as I would have liked, but I did see Paul Mullowney's talk about multi-panel prints assembled with wheat starch. Below is a slide from a 16th century diagram of how to assemble a map. Despite sounding completely esoteric, it was fascinating.

One of my favorite things about SGCI is always being introduced to printmakers whose work I'm unfamiliar with. Three artists received lifetime achievement awards, Don Farnsworth, Juan Fuentes, and Silvia Solochek Walters. I didn't know Juan or Silvia's work before, so glad I got a chance to see some of it in person.

Didn't manage to get a shot of Silvia receiving her award, but here are Juan, and below him, Don. A little blurry due to low light.

The whole conference ended with a dance party. Break dancing, conga lines, and even printmaking-based dance moves ("whipe the plate" etc.) made an appearance.

This was the first SGCI on the West Coast. The Bay Area held up as a great region for printmaking, naturally. And these pictures are only a fraction of everything and everyone I interacted with. Fingers crossed I can afford to go to Knoxville!