Paper Talk

Madonna Yoder started folding origami tessellations after taking Erik Demaine's Geometric Folding Algorithms class at MIT and she has designed over 300 new tessellations since 2018. Yoder helps aspiring tessellation folders to deeply understand tessellations so that they can fold from crease patterns, reverse engineer from photos, and even start designing their own tessellations through online...

Jane Ingram Allen is a sculptor and installation artist who uses hand papermaking with natural materials and collaborative processes to create indoor and outdoor artworks that raise public awareness about environmental issues. Jane has received numerous awards for residencies and community public art projects in the USA, the Philippines, Japan, Nepal, Brazil, China, Tanzania, Taiwan, Turkey, Indon...

Margaret Rhein has been involved full time in the art & craft of making paper by hand at her studio, Terrapin Paper Mill in Cincinnati, Ohio for the past 47 years. She has exhibited her paper collages in galleries and craft shows throughout the country and has taught many workshops in papermaking and book arts to adults and children. Over the years, she has made thousands of sheets of handmade...

Carol Barton is a painter, paper engineer, book artist and teacher who has published several editions and has organized both local and national shows, including the traveling Books and Bookends show and the Smithsonian Institution’s Science and the Artist's Book exhibition . Her work is exhibited internationally and is in numerous collections, including the Library of Congress, the Museum of Moder...

Andrew Dewar was born in Toronto in 1961, and has degrees in Journalism, Japanese Studies, and Library Science. He has lived in Japan since 1988. Since completing his Ph. D. studies at Keio University in Tokyo, he has taught at several colleges, and for the past decade has been principal of Tokai Daiichi Kindergarten as well as professor and Library Director at Tokai Gakuin University in Gifu, Jap...

Megan Singleton is a practicing artist, educator, and mother located in St. Louis, Missouri. The investigation of ecological relationships within society and the landscape is the basis of her work. As an interdisciplinary artist, she creates works that resonate with the materiality and rhythms of the natural world. Her creative practice intertwines sculpture, handmade paper, found objects, photogr...

Simon Arizpe is an award winning pop-up book designer, paper engineer and illustrator based in Brooklyn, NY. His work received the 2018-2019 Meggendorfer Prize, the highest honor in pop-up book design, as well as the Award of Excellence from the Society of Illustrators. A graduate of The Pratt Institute, Arizpe worked for over 10 years as the senior paper engineer at several of the top pop-up book...

Helen Hiebert is the author of six instructional books on papermaking and papercrafts and is widely respected as a generous teacher and mentor. Working from her studio in Colorado, Helen hosts classes and retreats, and extends her outreach by teaching online. Her weekly Sunday Paper Blog keeps the field up-to-date regarding a wide range of paper artists and paper-related news. Her monthly Paper Ta...

Susan Ruptash is a Toronto washi artist who works in a variety of paper arts including explorations of handmade heritage washi, printmaking and bookmaking, building on a lifelong fascination with the properties and possibilities of paper. Ruptash’s career as an architect has informed her explorations of structure, form, materiality and process. She is a member of Propeller Art Gallery, Open Studio...

Roberto Mannino explores form with an abstract, process oriented, non-realistic approach. In Papermaking the very fact that there is a molecular change from liquid to solid implies the presence of natural energies that are embedded in the process itself. His hands-on practice enables him to have a dialogue with the nature of things in relation to his own personal motivations.

Bruce Foster has paper engineered over 65 pop-up books, over 100 pop-up cards, and at least a dozen other unpublished works. Originally from southern Louisiana, Bruce attended art school at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville, earning his BFA with honors and returning later for graduate studies in studio art. Eventually settling in Houston, TX, he worked as a graphic designer and art director...

Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose decades-long practice embraces a wide range of scales and techniques, from large site-specific sculpture to artist’s books. Lyrical, nature-based biomorphic abstraction characterizes the work, focusing on life processes and systems. It addresses organic change and transformation, while exploring properties of materials. Armstrong received her Master o...

Russell Maret is a book artist and letter designer working in New York City. He began printing in San Francisco as a teenager before apprenticing with Peter Koch in Berkeley and Firefly Press in Somerville, Massachusetts. He set up his own press at the Center for Book Arts, New York in 1993 and has been printing and publishing ever since. In 1996 Russell began teaching himself to design letterform...

Tom Balbo has spent most of his life in and around Cleveland, Ohio. His earliest work was primarily in ceramics and printmaking. As his interest in papermaking grew, his work turned towards expressing his artistic creativity in this area. Over the past 40 years, Balbo's work has been exhibited and shown in a large number of shows and galleries, and he has garnered numerous awards and critical atte...

Marianne R. Petit is an artist and educator whose work explores fairy tales, anatomical obsessions, graphic and narrative medicine, as well as collective storytelling practices through mechanical books that combine animation and paper craft. Her interests are in combining technology, traditional book arts, and sequential storytelling to create new forms of narrative for the 21st century. Her movab...

Owen Gildersleeve is an artist specializing in handcrafted illustration, set design & art direction. His unique style honed over the past 12 years brings graphic designs to life through layers of hand-cut paper and a playful use of depth & shadow. His practice ranges from intricate illustrations, to large-scale sets and installations, teaming up with the likes of Apple, LUSH, Penguin Books...

Gill Wilson's background is rooted in craft practice, and she has had a papermaking studio for over 30 years. She studied papermaking in Japan after University. Since then, she has been a university lecturer and has worked as an advisor for Arts Council England. She was the manager of the Harley Gallery and is currently a director of Gallerytop.

Cathryn Miller has had an interest in making things out of paper since early childhood, and still believes that anything —except, perhaps, internal combustion engines— can be made out of paper. After being sidetracked in adult life by a short career as a theatrical designer, then a twenty year career as a textile artist, Miller returned to playing with paper in 1994. Since then, as Byopia Press, M...

Molly Grosse is co-founder of Rock Paper Store and an artist who works in a variety of mediums. Prior to founding Rock Paper Store, she worked as a wedding photographer, and her initial explorations with the paper were wedding products, like party favor boxes, invitations or waterproof flowers. Now we’ll be talking about what Rock Paper is, but once Molly dove into the process of making this paper...

I interviewed Nicole Magistro, the author/publisher and Alice Feagan, the illustrator of the picture book, Read Island . Join a very brave girl and her furry friends on an adventure to Read Island! Through the power of imagination and the pleasure of reading, this curious trio set sail for a magical island made of books. On their way they discover a joyful collection of animals converging by sea a...

Kelli Anderson is a designer and paper engineer whose work operates in the space between conceptual art, graphic design, and tech. Her whimsical books have featured a working paper planetarium, a pop-up pinhole camera, and a paper record player. Whenever she can, she uses humble, lo-fi materials to expose the invisible magic of the world and make abstract concepts real and tangible. Anderson's wor...

Maro Vandorou is a visual artist of Greek origin, who is living and working in California. Her formal training has a strong interdisciplinary character informed by studies in the visual arts, interaction design, literature, psychology, digital and computer technologies. Her work explores the process of transformation through installations of original photographic material, writings, and artists’ b...

As Storey’s publisher and editorial director, Deborah Balmuth heads up efforts to acquire and publish outstanding, long-lasting nonfiction books that support Story Publishing’s mission of promoting personal independence in harmony with the environment. She works with a group of passionate editors who seek out promotable authors with deep, hands-on knowledge and wisdom on topics ranging from garden...

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...

Susan Kristoferson specializes in surface design processes on paper such as itajime (Japanese fold, clamp, and dye) and hand painted paste papers, She lives and works in Turner Valley, Alberta, in Canada, on hilltop with a view of the foothills and Rockies along with her husband and a small farm of chickens and sheep. Kristoferson is inspired by the long-distance view from her home and studio wher...