Handmade paper at ONO

If you're in the Tuscaloosa area this Thursday, stop by the One Night Only Artique for the opening of Fiber/Book. It's a group show that I've been working hard to coordinate, and it should be good. We'll have books, sculpture, broadsides, and even a little knitting on view.

Thanks to Amy, we've even got some lovely postcards to advertise the event. They make me feel like a very important artist.

For those of you who can't make it, I'm going to photograph all of the work and upload it onto my flickr account. You'll be able to view to online exhibit sometime early next week, after the insanity of installation and presenting the art at the opening.

I'm particularly excited about this show because handmade paper is one of my favorite mediums to work in. Before I learned bookbinding and letterpress printing, I was a knitter and a fabric hoarder, and my love for fiber competed with my love for book arts. However, learning to make paper by hand, from all sorts of forged and recycled materials, allowed me to find ways to incorporate fiber arts into my bookwork. Fiber/Book is my first attempt at bringing my love for handmade paper (and by proxy book and fiber arts) to the community. Alongside the finished work, we'll have photographs of the paper making process, a nice introductory placard that begins to answer the "why/what about handmade paper?" question, and a gathering of handmade paper samples arranged like a spectrum across one gallery wall.

I want other people to be as excited about making paper by hand as I am. Hopefully the informative nature of this show will allow for that to happen. And maybe it will build enough interest for me to teach a workshop in May. That would certainly be a lovely outcome of this already lovely event.