Paper Talk

By Helen Hiebert Studio

Paper Talk is an ongoing series of interviews by Helen Hiebert featuring artists and professionals who are working in the field of hand papermaking.... more

4.9

3030 ratings

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FAQs about Paper Talk:

How many episodes does Paper Talk have?

The podcast currently has 198 episodes available.

Paper Talk episodes:

October 11, 2018 Paper For Water
Paper For Water is a non-profit organization that raises money to build wells around the world so that everyone will have access to clean water. Listen to Isabelle and Katherine describe how they started the organization with a goal of raising $500 by folding origami ornaments and accepting donations for them when they were 5 and 8 years old. They ended up raising $10,000 and never looked back. Paper for Water has now raised more than $1.3M and has helped fund over 150 water projects in fourteen countries. Trinity talks about how she invented the Candy Dish, which is featured in the 2019 Twelve Months of Paper Calendar. Their father Ken taught the girls origami, which he learned as a child from his Japanese mother and then from the books of Tomoko Fuse, whose modular origami led to the ornaments his girls now create. And their mother Deborah tells us about some of the projects, the volunteers and just how much of a difference kids can make in changing the world. Continue reading Paper For Water
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47min
October 11, 2018 Paper For Water
You can listen to this episode by clicking on the white arrow above, or subscribe to the Paper Talk podcast in iTunes so you never miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, please leave a review on Itunes. This helps other people learn about it. Thank you!

Isabelle, Katherine and Trinity Adams are the three sisters behind the non-profit Paper For Water. They fold and sell origami products, raising money to bring water and the Word to the thirsty. When the sisters learned about girls world-wide who do not get to go to school because they spend their days hauling water, and that a child dies every 20 seconds from unclean water, they wanted to make a change. Paper For Water seeks to empower the youth in developed countries with skills in leadership, philanthropy, and entrepreneurship. It also wants to improve their understanding, compassion, empathy and to broaden their knowledge of the world around them.
Trinity designed the June project – an origami candy dish – for the Twelve Months of Paper Calendar, and she shows us how to make it in the video above.
View some of Paper For Water’s modular origami ornaments here and find out more about their collaboration with Neiman Marcus stores.
Watch Paper For Water on Nickolodeon’s Halo Effect. You’ll see the special pottery-like origami paper they had printed at Spoonflower!
Watch The Gift of Water
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47min
September 21, 2018 Melissa Jay Craig
Melissa Jay Craig is a Chicago artist. In this episode, she explains how her first artist’s residency coincided with having just learned about papermaking, and how instead of lugging 400 books to the residency to create the type of work she had been making, she took just two books and some kozo fiber and was able to cast paper-shaped books instead. We discuss a nomadic artistic life comprised of a period in which she traveled around the country doing residencies and teaching gigs. And we touch on one of her works, S/Edition, that ended up going viral by being featured on This is Colossal. Continue reading Melissa Jay Craig
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41min
September 21, 2018 Melissa Jay Craig
You can listen to this episode by clicking on the white arrow above, or subscribe to the Paper Talk podcast in iTunes so you never miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, tell a friend about it! Thank you so much.
Melissa Jay Craig makes books, objects and installations using plant-derived materials. She is 96% retired from teaching and lives in Chicago where she grows milkweed, raises the Monarch butterflies it hosts, then harvests, processes and works with the fiber.
Here’s a photo of the installation S/Edition that went viral on This Is Colossal.
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Music featuring excerpts of Makin’ Paper folk song by Peter Thomas. Listen to the full song and find out about other paper and book arts folk songs.
Gary A. Hanson did the sound editing for this episode. You can find him making audio magic with his podcast series, I’ll Have a Beer and Talk, a show about tech news, culture, weird animal stories and of course, beer.
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41min
August 12, 2018 Matt Simpson
Matt Simpson is founder and CEO of Green Banana Paper in Micronesia. We talk about how Matt ended up on this remote island as a teacher, his desire to stay there and surf, and how he put two and two together when he realized that all of his students were leaving the island to find work and that the banana fiber that had been used to make clothing in the distant past could also be made into paper. Listen to how Green Banana Paper creates jobs through sustainable practices on the tiny island of Kosrae, with a people population of 6000 and a banana tree population of 250,000. It’s fascinating! Continue reading Matt Simpson
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52min
August 12, 2018 Matt Simpson
You can listen to this episode by clicking on the white arrow above, or subscribe to the Paper Talk podcast in iTunes so you never miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, tell a friend about it! Thank you so much.
Matt Simpson is CEO of Green Banana Paper, a social-enterprise he founded to address the scarcity of job opportunities in Micronesia, that is forcing younger generations of islanders to trade their beautiful home and families for minimum wage jobs in the USA. Green Banana Paper sustainably and ethically manufactures handmade vegan wallets and paper products from recycled agricultural banana waste in Kosrae, Micronesia. The company exhibits at trade shows and festivals, including the Hawaii Ink & Art Expo, ASD Market Week in Las Vegas, and Pacific Trade & Invest in New Zealand. Matt lived on Wotje Atoll in the Marshall Islands as a volunteer high school teacher with the WorldTeach program in 2007. The following year he moved to Kosrae, Micronesia, and coordinated the WorldTeach program there. He taught at the single high school on the island for four more years. Through this cultural immersion he learned local languages, customs, and lifestyles. Green Banana Paper has been featured on Mashable, One Green Planet, Pacific Daily News, and other online platforms.
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52min
July 19, 2018 Melissa Potter
Through her practice, which includes art making, writing, curating and teaching, Melissa Potter focuses on traditions that are endangered, underpaid and under-recognized due to industrialization, war, gender bias, and globalization. In this episode, we discuss her Quaker upbringing in New Jersey that instilled her desire to be an activist, how she has expanded upon The Papermaker’s Garden (that I initiated at Dieu Donné Papermill in the mid 90’s) and has continued to develop it as a socially engaged practice. We also discuss her career path – as an advocate for artists at the New York Foundation for the Arts, her work through the Fulbright Program to build paper studios at the University of Serbia and the University of Sarajevo and her current position as Associate Professor of Art & Art History at Columbia College Chicago, where some of her goals are to give students who may never have access to a papermaking studio after college a transformative experience and to document the legacy of hand papermaking as a craft form in the United States. Continue reading Melissa Potter
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37min
July 19, 2018 Melissa Potter
You can listen to this episode by clicking on the white arrow above, or subscribe to the Paper Talk podcast in iTunes so you never miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, tell a friend about it! Thank you so much.
Melissa Potter is a multi-media artist whose work deals with women and their rites of passage from marriage to motherhood. She exhibited at venues including White Columns, and Bronx Museum of the Arts, as well as film festivals including the VideoDumbo Festival and the Reeling International LGBT Film Festival. She is a three-time Fulbright recipient to Serbia and Bosnia and Hercegovina. Through these programs, she built two papermaking studios at university art departments. She has been the recipient of other awards and residencies including the Soros Fund for Arts and Culture, ArtsLink and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Potter co-curated exhibitions including Social Paper, the first exhibition considering hand papermaking in a socially engaged art context, and Among Tender Roots, the first retrospective of Mexican artist, Laura Anderson Barbata’s work. Her critical essays have been printed in BOMB, Art Papers, Flash Art, Metropolis M, Hand Papermaking, and AfterImage among others. She is founder of the blog, Gender Assignment.

She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art & Art History Program at Columbia College Chicago.
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Music featuring excerpts of Makin’ Paper folk song by Peter Thomas. Listen to the full song and find out about other paper and book arts folk songs.
Gary A. Hanson did the sound editing for this episode. You can find him making audio magic with his podcast series, I’ll Have a Beer and Talk, a show about tech news, culture, weird animal stories and of course, beer.
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37min
June 15, 2018 Tom Leech
In this episode, Tom Leech tells us about his early memory of the smell of paper, when his missionary aunt sent him toys from Japan wrapped in Japanese paper; his first experience with papermaking when he studied sculpture and printmaking with Winifred Lutz; and how his interest in environmentalism led him to make recycled paper at 18,000 feet on Mt. Everest. He also tells us about reintroducing monks at a monastery in Tibet to hand papermaking and how the word ‘recycled’ wasn’t translatable so the closest they could come was to call it reincarnated paper. At that point, everyone at the monastery was interested! Continue reading Tom Leech
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44min
June 15, 2018 Tom Leech
You can listen to this episode by clicking on the white arrow above, or subscribe to the Paper Talk podcast in iTunes so you never miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, tell a friend about it! Thank you so much.
Thomas Leech, director of the Press at the Palace of the Governors, has more than 40 years’ experience in printing, paper-making, and related book-arts. A curator at the New Mexico History Museum since 2001, Leech has organized a number of successful exhibits, including Album Amicorum: Gems of Friendship in a Frightened World; The Saint John’s Bible; Jack Kerouac and the Writers Life; Gustave Baumann and Friends: Artist Cards from Holidays Past; and Shakespeare from Stage to Page.
Books and broadsides that Leech has printed include Doctor Franklin & Spain, Jack Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys; O’Keeffe Stories; Word Art Poetry Portfolio; and he has published all of Santa Fe’s Poets Laureate in fine limited editions. He also authored a number of articles for El Palacio and Hand Papermaking magazines, and has been included in many Hand papermaking Portfolios
Under Leech’s leadership, the Palace Press received the 2014 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design, the 2015 Edgar Lee Hewett Award from the New Mexico Association of Museums, the 2013 City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Tom was a member of the 1990 and ’92 Everest Environmental Expeditions, and in 1994 co-founded the Paper Road/Tibet Project, teaching traditional papermaking to disabled and orphaned children in Lhasa and rural areas of Tibet. Since 2010, Tom has facilitated Alzheimer’s Poetry Project events at the New Mexico History Museum.
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Music featuring excerpts of Makin’ Paper folk song by Peter Thomas. Listen to the full song and find out about other paper and book arts folk songs.
Gary A. Hanson did the sound editing for this episode. You can find him making audio magic with his podcast series, I’ll Have a Beer and Talk, a show about tech news, culture, weird animal stories and of course, beer.
...more
44min

FAQs about Paper Talk:

How many episodes does Paper Talk have?

The podcast currently has 198 episodes available.

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