abaca paper, wire, collage, gouache

I collect in order to remind myself of who I am and why I am. This piece, titled Annual Honesty, speaks on the intersection and union of the body and its biome. These structures are memories preserved; fossilized nervous system responses that have since been plucked from the stem of experience and laid out to dry. The objects, corporal in their appearance, illustrate the feelings attached to several memories and moments that are stored within the body and nervous system. In an attempt to find relief from trauma, I spend a lot of time picking it apart and figuring it out. This collection of artifacts serves as a diagram I continuously return to in order to make sense of the pain I grow through.

pulp painting (arch), blowout (balanced rock)

To members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Mormons), the temple is the pinnacle of religious progression. The rites performed in the temple are necessary to receive salvation, and access to these rites is strictly controlled. Stepping away from the church means surrendering access to the blessings that are promised in these rites, as well as potentially losing family and community. It is a diffcult choice for those who make it, myself included. This diptych begins to explore my faith journey, using imagery from Arches National Park. In the piece on the left, I am looking out from the inside, as if from a window, and seeing for the first time the possibilities that exist outside. In the piece on the right, I am looking back as a now-outsider and seeing how the temple was nothing more than a monument to man’s ego.

handmade paper, toner transfer, collagraph

I view my work as both a love-letter and a gimmick. I make it with recycled or found materials: essentially, from garbage. I remix paper's historical function as a conduit of information by embedding a pastiche of contemporary data formats into my handmade paper. I am seduced by what paper can do, and what it already does– how it persists now in our ordinary lives despite its looming obsolescence.

shaped paper with letterpress embossing

Reimagining these objects in paper, I work diligently to capture their essence. Ignoring certain signifiers and respecting others, I flirt with the line of recognition. I am interested in the use of idiom in relation to these ubiquitous objects, leaning into ideas of over-used sentiments and objects.

These are shaped sheets of paper that made with pigmented pulp. I then used the letter press to emboss "dirty work". It is an edition of 25, existing as a stacked sculpture.

handmade papers (Kozo, cotton/abaca), screen print, image transfers, embedded objects and photo Lithography, hand typed

Since childhood I've had a deep love of vintage ephemera: photos, magazines, and found objects. In tandem with my papermaking and books arts practice, a combination of old and new transports the viewer to another time in space. The handmade paper process is an exercise in patience, and I enjoy blending both conventional and experimental processes while letting the material guide me. I enjoy leaving space to question the why of a process and what it means to the work I’m creating. This process helps the work become a transformative personal story that sings through traditional research and techniques while allowing space for new concepts and ideas.

paper/risograph print

Abstraction, fluidity, and failure, at once constitute and move outwards/alongside transgender bodies. Through modular “body double” compositions, I depict the delight of pushing the body into ever shifting and unstable terrains. The blurring of these mediums is an alchemy that I find to be a ripe metaphor for rethinking how we might embrace life patterns, identities, or dis-identifications. I reject the limitations imposed by specific fields and “proper” techniques. To me, the most exciting moments come when the categorization is unrecognizable or takes on a multitude of poetic interpretations. What can be gained from belonging nowhere and everywhere?

Painting, printmaking, sculpture, graphic design, tattooing, ceramics, and functional design are remixed in meandering and improvised compositions. I attempt to capture snapshots of moments right before collapse. However, speaking in terms of metaphor, sometimes the shutter speed is too high or low or often my finger is obscuring the corner of the viewfinder. I stubbornly commit to displaying the entire roll because I am searching for possibilities, not perfection. My work plays with the tension of holding on and letting go, with the understanding that there will be many different iterations. There is fluidity in failure and it requires us to embrace the cyclical nature of time, growth, and love. In doing so, we can find the joy and connection that are vital to understanding ourselves and each other. My practice inserts us at this intersection of surrender and joy.

handmade paper, natural dyes, letterpress printed

Inhabited is an artist book that recreates a meditative walk through the Iowa landscape. In the 1830’s, 80% of the state of Iowa was made up of prairie. Now only 0.1 percent of that original prairie is left. Can reclaimed wilderness be considered a truly wild space? The text is letterpress printed with handset Bembo metal type on six different types of handmade paper that was especially produced for this project by the artist. Some of the pulp has been naturally dyed with plants native to Iowa: osage, chestnut, marigold, and walnut. The text is sparsely laid out on each page. This choice encourages the reader to sit with each line of text, as if they stopped while walking to take in sunlight filyering through the trees, or to watch a leaf float down a stream. There are 25 editions of this book.

papermaking, bookbinding, woodworking

Inspired by the resiliency of the Asian diaspora casting across book, fine arts, and academic cultures, I explore ethnic and gender dynamics within Asian American identity and aesthetics. My work engages the in-betweens of race; it is a physical manifestation of ethnicity, displacement, and the malnourishment of trauma. Through vignettes of racial oppression, sexual exploitation, and family abandonment, I comb through personal tragedies to create visual narratives that bring traditional East Asian papermaking and craft into intimate sculptural book forms. Integrating my story with time-honored Korean ingenuity, I aspire to develop trust through creative transparency, no matter the uneasiness, for valuable connections between history, its people, and others hindered by social punishment. It is my hope to encourage ancestral discovery and assembly, developing avenues for Asians, Asian Americans, and all BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ peoples to explore their creative truths without censorship.

papermaking, bookbinding, woodworking

Inspired by the resiliency of the Asian diaspora casting across book, fine arts, and academic cultures, I explore ethnic and gender dynamics within Asian American identity and aesthetics. My work engages the in-betweens of race; it is a physical manifestation of ethnicity, displacement, and the malnourishment of trauma. Through vignettes of racial oppression, sexual exploitation, and family abandonment, I comb through personal tragedies to create visual narratives that bring traditional East Asian papermaking and craft into intimate sculptural book forms. Integrating my story with time-honored Korean ingenuity, I aspire to develop trust through creative transparency, no matter the uneasiness, for valuable connections between history, its people, and others hindered by social punishment. It is my hope to encourage ancestral discovery and assembly, developing avenues for Asians, Asian Americans, and all BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ peoples to explore their creative truths without censorship.

handmade paper

hedonism and complacency

the rich smell of hot earth and pinewood

soft languor mounting to the brain

the sequel to this mood is, inevitably, a thunderstorm

A dichotomy exists in all of Western culture: pitting the landscape, the feminine, the intuitive, the savage, and the decorative against “dominant” cultural spaces, the masculine, the rational, the civilized, and the essential. My work focuses on such dichotomies as they manifest in the American South. Pattern and repetition are at the center of my practice, acting at once as inspiration, method, and subject matter. I complicate visual forms with found language collected throughout my research on the South. Treating written language as a visual pattern, I abstract and camouflage it within the swirls and curves of handmade paper string in order to obscure its legibility and return it to 'nature'. This work twists the boundaries of false hierarchies in order to challenge the notion that the two ends of a spectrum could ever be separated, that they could ever be anything other than different but equally important threads in the larger tapestry of life.

artist book, handmade paper with gauze, letterpress printed

My artistic practice focuses on my experiences as an islander, the good and the bad, the joys and hurricanes that come with living in Puerto Rico. Through my art, I explore my ancestry, the concept of healing and identity, the decolonization of the Puerto Rican mind, and the exploration of energetic bodies that are not visible. Book Arts and handmade paper have allowed me to manipulate aspects of my pieces from the beginning and in conversation with the material, giving me the opportunity to carry out research and experiments with my materials until I reach the aesthetics and form that I desire. Harvesting, cooking, sewing, ripping, stretching and natural dyeing are some of the processes that I incorporate the most in my work as I focus on the qualities of the fiber, the textile, the written and visual language and, the book form as a whole.

acrylic, colored pencil and pigmented cotton pulp on handmade paper

My art practice is interdisciplinary but I approach making through a lens grounded in a painting and drawing vocabulary. The act of making itself serves as a way of thinking and exploring. Like an athlete I treat the studio as an arena for dedicated practice and I embrace the ritualistic aspects of a continuous dialogue with creation. I use mark making or form as a vehicle to deploy an exploration into an extensive spectrum of material phenomenon. Within my practice there is a conglomeration of influences from a wide array of moments within the complex history of abstraction. Throughout the work I sample various material methodologies, compositional conventions, and formal modernist strategies from said influences to reconfigure and remix various modes of making.

collaged letterpress prints embedded in highly beaten abaca paper

I am always imagining what a story can look like. My typographic training and my background in book design are where I begin, but I'm always reaching for something new, something more. My work reflects my own story: the tension between growing up in rural Missouri and then somehow going on to travel the world in my 20s, the intense expectations of motherhood, the revelation of being diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 30. I hope that my work invites viewers to consider their own stories, as well as the collective stories we hold in common--stories of how we got here, who was left behind, the hopes we have for tomorrow.

Our finite lives are full of moments that will never come again. There is a sense that once a moment has passed, our supply of moments is smaller than before. We pick up moments from a pool of experiences, often without the reverence we’d show if we believed them to be unique, the last, never to be retrieved. We build a timeline, a story, our memories. But to treat each moment merely as a notch in a narrative obscures the shocking reality that our lives are lived only in the present and we are, too soon, to run out of our allotted time.

double couched abaca paper, screen print inclusion, handmade cotton blowout inclusion, pulp painting

My work explores the relationship between mind, body, and space. I create atmosphere within my pieces that express the connection and disconnection between these elements. The feelings of expansion and isolation, disassociation and hyperawareness, and the predictably unpredictable reoccur with in my work. Ultimately I want to make the unseen process of mental, physical, and spacial processing seen as a reminder that we are spontaneous beings living with in planned systems.

screenprint on handmade cotton rag paper

Within my work I push forward concepts of memory and nostalgia derived from domestic spaces with the use of paper making, printmaking and painting. Recreated scenes from my own memory utilize unnatural colors, creating an atmosphere that is fantastical and unreal. Intertwining the concepts of nostalgia and memory to these scenes, a sense of familiarity and comfort comes across.

I continue to question what nostalgia means and the idea that nostalgia is a romanticized version of our memories. Perhaps this is why we get homesick for our homes away from home, we feel nostalgic about the time we were there, reflecting on the past and longing for a moment that we can only look back at in fondness. This is what I try to capture in my work as you come across its bright colors and its imitations of a domestic space and its objects, a fabrication of a moment or memory that feels familiar.

persimmon juice and indigo on mulberry paper

The flow of water, indigo, and fibers pass simultaneously between one another to embrace, envelop, and enclasp- just in the way that my mother, my grandmother, and my ancestors had passed their gifts onto me. Through these various techniques of creating paper and textiles that are so embedded in my ancestry, I wonder- where was it that the value of these materials and traditions were lost? And with that, what repair is necessary within the fragments of my intersectional identity, in order to liberate myself from the binary of ‘Korean’ or ‘American’? Through these baskets, broken poetries make way to reflect the alternating strengths and gaps within the relationship between myself, nature, and heritage. I reflect in awe of the resourcefulness of gifting through a time in which we grasp to replace what has been lost- fragments, fractures, and repair.

photogravure on abaca

Dolce Vita is a photogravure print on abaca. The subject is my childhood horse who lost the use of her legs due to a genetic disease. Creating this work helped me cope with the loss and changes I’ve gone through this past year.

handmade corn husk/silk paper, birch bark, seed beads

Sacred Sisters was created in response to MMIWG2S/MMIP (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit/Missing and Murdered Indigenous People). We are told that red is the only color that spirits can see and when we wear red, we are calling the spirits of our loved ones who are missing back home. This vessel carries prayers and messages to our loved ones, prayers for safe passage home

cut paper with handmade paper and natural dyes

As humans, we tend to think of ourselves as separate from the natural world when in reality we are a part of it as much as any other living thing. Looking at the anatomy of the human body you can see similarities in the way we and the Earth look and function, even down to the lines in our skin and the structure of our cells. What first appears as roots can tangle into neurons, yet still have blooming flowers, blurring the lines between human and nonhuman anatomy and showing the deeply ingrained connections of man and the Earth. The use of the fingerprint, something exclusive to each person, calls to question both our own individual connections to the planet, as well as the mark we leave behind. For myself, dyeing paper using materials found in nature helps to remind me of my own connection to the planet, and the fragility of the paper alludes to the delicate balance that exists with humanity's role in the environment

naturally dyed hand made paper from Kozo and mitsumata, red synthetic dye, old print works on handmade paper repurposed into weave

Inspired by West-African textile cultures in Ghana and Nigeria: Batik, Adinkra- cloth making, Kente-weaving, and Adire-cultures influenced my approach in making this piece. K3t3 1 references the Kente Cloth culture. Driven by their aesthetics, approach and general politics, I reinvent these techniques and I am adopting an active practice of recycling, reusing, and seeking out new materials for the extension of these traditional techniques. I explored the use of Paper to reinvent the practice of Kente in a more simplistic approach which hammers on my interest in dailiness, fleeting moments and sustainability. Paper to me suggest a medium of fragility which is subject to so many stuff like tear, breakage, transformation which relates to the themes of loss, degeneration, transition, and my place as a female artist from Ghana (the only in my family) that I am interested in.

bread, kozo, spinach and bread mold

B-1 is an investigation into themes of decay, material effect, degeneration, wear and tear that I am constantly exploring in my work. In this piece, I explored the use of bread and kozo fiber (as a binder) to explore these themes and observe how the work reacts to the ideas I am interested in. It also highlights my interest in the use of everyday materials I consume or engage with, the dailiness of these materials and the fleeting moments of the everyday. The changes, the crackle effect, the smell are all factors in this piece that I intend the audience to interact with.

handmade paper textile and serigraphy

With the rise of Asian hate crimes I’ve been increasingly compelled to explore the notions of what it means to be “Asian in America,” particularly through my own lens as a Filipinx-American. I also began contemplating the intimate nature of what we wear and why, the politics of garments, and traditional ties to clothing. I designed and printed the paper shirts as a hybrid stand-in for a formal button-down workwear shirt and as a reference to Barong: a translucent traditional Filipino garment. In a way, the garments have a hybridized identity spanning between the worlds of the United States and the Philippines.

Shirts are worn on a body of many forms and experiences. A laboring body. A body that mitigates. A body that is othered. A body that provides care. A body that endures harm and violence. A body that is fetishized. The shirt here signifes Filipinx-American culture while reflecting on the labor the body endures.

handmade paper/pulp painting/abaca and jean

Recent explorations in my work have centered on environmental issues, especially rivers and water scarcity. Water is the fundamental ingredient of life. Meanwhile, it allows us to celebrate and be joyful, which is so limited today as a vast majority of people are dealing with ever-increasing water scarcity issues every day. However, my goal is to understand and send out a message of caution and alarm about our water, the most essential requirement for life. "Fetching water" is a multi-part installation created from abaca and jean pulp. The development of the pattern forms comes from the experience of using cultural motifs in addition to bringing attention to water drops, reminding the water vessels that the women and girls who must spend much of their time and energy fetching water for their homes. They are desperate and suffering from drought and water shortages in their homeland.

handmade paper with pulp paintings

I search for meaning by creating art in collaboration with the qualities and limitations of the physical. Through handling, observing, manipulating, listening, sensing, and responding to materials, I explore connections between the self and the external world. I try to capture internal, intangible experiences which inform spiritual understanding.

My process is to construct pieces, combining intuitive, kinesthetic mark making and material handling with an overall vision that transforms as I respond to a work in progress. Evidence of construction is purposefully prominent, resulting in pieces which feel transitory rather than fixed. I strive to let the essence of each material have a voice within the creation of the work.

I am interested in examining memory, longing, desire, time, entropy, transformation, love, and capturing the preciousness of acts by the human hand. My work tries to activate the viewer’s body by creating an environment they can navigate physically and psychologically.

handmade paper, photogravure, screenprint, stitching

WE EXIST is a recent ethnographic study I conducted on how African immigrants survive here in Wisconsin with a focus on the Madison area. These individuals in the community share similar stories about life and the process of gaining legal status. We Exist is an accumulated data collection from illegal Africans immigrants used in three experimental artistic ideas. To raise awareness of how my subjects live anonymously and protecting the identities of these immigrants, their portraits are reconstructed using artificial intelligence (AI) to create unfamiliar faces based on the features of those who are undocumented . These portraits are accompanied by screen-printed texts that capture some concerns expressed by these immigrants, which are layered several times creating an abstraction that conceals some detail information as well .

These images and prints are created exclusively on handmade papers made from textiles collected from these individual immigrants. These textile materials sourced from them are grouped into similar color palettes and are used to reference the term, Alien. To demonstrate the process of transformation of textile materials into paper, some of these textile materials are collaged with portraits . The classification of aliens as non-citizens is portrayed artistically through the use of color photographs and the representation of non-existing human-like faces.

handmade paper, embedding, cyanotype and screenprint

WE EXIST is a recent ethnographic study I conducted on how African immigrants survive here in Wisconsin with a focus on the Madison area. These individuals in the community share similar stories about life and the process of gaining legal status. We Exist is an accumulated data collection from illegal Africans immigrants used in three experimental artistic ideas. To raise awareness of how my subjects live anonymously and protecting the identities of these immigrants, their portraits are reconstructed using artificial intelligence (AI) to create unfamiliar faces based on the features of those who are undocumented . These portraits are accompanied by screen-printed texts that capture some concerns expressed by these immigrants, which are layered several times creating an abstraction that conceals some detail information as well .

These images and prints are created exclusively on handmade papers made from textiles collected from these individual immigrants. These textile materials sourced from them are grouped into similar color palettes and are used to reference the term, Alien. To demonstrate the process of transformation of textile materials into paper, some of these textile materials are collaged with portraits . The classification of aliens as non-citizens is portrayed artistically through the use of color photographs and the representation of non-existing human-like faces.

abaca, cotton and ax paper sculptures, moss, seed, velvet, insect pins

In my art practice, I explore the interconnection between humans and nature to create work that emanates the transformative qualities of both. I’m interested in the relationship between artistic process and biological process and convey this relationship using a scientific method of inquiry to investigate my own art as a living organism and dissect it in various ways through printmaking, drawing, and sculpture. With my work, I also question the aesthetic value of the natural environment and the aesthetic engagement within it.

In the process of changing environments myself, my work has evolved into nonrepresentational pieces conveying the experience of living and creating in different contexts and places, the Midwest and the Caribbean. Through ideas of collecting and intermittent field studies of my current environments that unveil natural objects, I study their morphology to create hybridizations and iterations of them. In turn reflect upon the experience of displacement through the process of discovery, exploration, and associations.

Eastern handmade paper made from gampi, hemp and mulberry bark, indigo dipped paper strips, and written poem about the elements of papermaking embedded into woven cloth

My creative practice has been driven by intuitive exploration and my love of papermaking and material craft processes. The fibers I work with support the stories I am telling through their own botanical histories originating in Asia as well as growing in the Midwest. My current research, focused on my cultural heritage and identity as an Asian American with immigrant parents from Vietnam and China, references ideas informed by ancestral tradition and environmental change. I am concerned with sharing a story that carries the elemental values of 山(earth), 天 (sky), 水(water), and 人 (people).

handmade paper

I created this in one of my first classes at Cedar Crest college. This particular class was an amazing experience, I enjoyed creating these compositions in a way I had never thought of before. I really appreciate my teacher Jill Odegard for guiding us with the elements of design and using paper making as a medium while also giving us the creative freedom to use this to make our compositions with little limitations. With this piece in particular I feel like I had really thought outside of the box and took a chance by relying on the vision I had in my mind. My favorite part being the sections in the middle I cut and folded to pop out and give a dimensional aspect to my accordion book.

paper casting

My work is a constant search for the best way to interpret the ideas I have about myself and the world around me, focusing on immigration, mental health, and social justice. I was born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where strong cultural traditions have combined, been forgotten, and blurred with American culture, and have formed me into who I am today.

I take inspiration from personal experiences creating work as an extension of my past, where I come from and what has shaped me. The combination of bookbinding, printmaking, and design allows me to preserve these moments and memories.

collage with abaca and flax handmade papers, sunflowers, tea leaves, cyanotypes, thread

Instances of Seeing is a series of handmade paper works I made in my backyard, working outside in the open air, moving my entire body around the mold and deckle. It is a performative act, a ceremonial act – mixing water, paper fiber, pigments, and natural materials, such as dried flowers and tealeaves, together. I imagine that I am mixing these large cups of tea with my whole body, arms circling in the floating offering before me. I began to make physical holes in the surface of the paper during the wet stage of the papermaking process. These holes evoke the slipping, fading, and warped nature of memory - how events slowly begin to fill with holes as time slips by and details, scents, colors, and shapes within our memories slowly fade without us noticing. Shadowed figures appear as characters the viewer can slip into as they take in the textures and snippets of imagery – collaging together their own story.

handmade paper

Found objects - arranged, combined, animated - have been my medium since I began designing miniature theaters. Through papermaking I have finally found a way to compress arrangements of objects into two-dimensional tableaux that can hang, however precariously, in space….

paper pulp drawing

My practice explores the complexities of our beings: an entanglement of tendernesses and vulnerabilities that make up a beautiful, yet strange and difficult existence. How have we been shaped and what does that space feel like? We each carry the weight of our various histories, though these stories largely remain unknown to us. Where do we intersect? A large part of my work is seeking to re-connect how we see and care for ourselves and the natural world.

My foundational practice is works on paper, primarily using inks I have made from plants and soils. Some of these colors and papers will distort with time, fading, darkening, crumbling. I want to lean into this impermanence as a practice of letting go and allowing for change to occur. My drawings explore narratives of human, animal, and plant forms mingling together, revealing themes of stillness, transformation, vulnerability, compassion, and connection.

papermaking, collage

I love the creative process of being given a prompt and having the freedom to explore ideas from all angles. I like getting projects that I don't immediately get hundreds of ideas on because sometimes the best art comes from frustration and collecting suggestions.

pigmented cotton base sheet with pulp-painted linen

As a student in the UA Book Arts program, nearly all of my paper works revolve around my personal experiences with and relationship to memory. As a child, my paternal grandmother (called ‘nana’) often encouraged me to explore my creativity and various modes of personal expression. Her own artistic spirit and quick-witted personality became my greatest inspiration, especially following her death in 2013. In each of the pieces included here, I consider the ways some of my fondest childhood memories with my nana – particularly the experience of running our hands through the eucalyptus bush in her front yard as we raced to the mailbox together – are influenced and shaped by the passage of time.

handmade paper/blowout

As a student in the UA Book Arts program, nearly all of my paper works revolve around my personal experiences with and relationship to memory. As a child, my paternal grandmother (called ‘nana’) often encouraged me to explore my creativity and various modes of personal expression. Her own artistic spirit and quick-witted personality became my greatest inspiration, especially following her death in 2013. In each of the pieces included here, I consider the ways some of my fondest childhood memories with my nana – particularly the experience of running our hands through the eucalyptus bush in her front yard as we raced to the mailbox together – are influenced and shaped by the passage of time.

handmade paper

The quilt on my parent’s bed has always been a source of comfort. The washed out colors, loose seams and soft surface aged by time, now represent a time in my life in which all problems faded away as I snuggled up under the covers with my mom. Inspired by the resourceful nature of quilt making, I utilized scraps from my collection of handmade paper to sew three small quilt tops with patterning and stitching inspired by my parent’s quilt. To create the two handmade paper pieces, I used recycled cotton clothing sent by my grandmother. By preparing several colors of paper pulp and laser cut stencils, I was able to build the textile inspired imagery as the paper was made. Together, this collection represents several generations of textile comfort - my grandparent’s clothing, my parent’s quilt, and my love for the papermaking process.

cotton and abaca paper, pulp paint

Conversation is both a series and a variable edition. The piece speaks to intimacy, taking the viewer on a meandering walk through a dreamlike dialogue. Drawing on her background in sequential art, Ziegler created stencils based on the visual language of comics. She then experimented to see how many impactful compositions she could make using only those stencils and three colors of cotton pulp paint. Over the course of the project, Ziegler developed a narrative, implying characters and dialogues through strategic use of speech bubbles and complimentary colors.