Paper Talk

John Risseeuw received his BS, MA, and MFA degrees in printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in1968, 1972, and 1973, respectively. Risseeuw is Emeritus Professor of Art at Arizona State University where he taught printmaking, book arts, and papermaking from 1980 to 2015. He directed the Pyracantha Press, founded in 1982 as the book arts imprint of ASU; his own Cabbagehead Press was founded in 1972. His prints, books, and collaborative works have been exhibited and collected widely. The Library of Congress has purchased all of his books and works on paper. He was founding president of the College Book Art Association and has served on the Board of Directors of Hand Papermaking magazine.

John Babcock lives and works at his studio near Santa Cruz,California, where he creates works using primarily paper as his medium. His work has been shown in over thirty major art museums in the United States and Europe. Most recently, his work was included in Contemporary Crafts at the Mesa Art Museum and the Shanghai Paper Art Biennale in Shanghai, China. 

In addition to exhibiting his work, Babcock has lectured and conducted workshops throughout the United States and internationally, including sessions at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio, Texas; the Universityof Wisconsin; the University of Hawaii; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; and the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including The Museum of Art and Design in NewYork City.

Tran Hong Nhung is the founder of Zo Project, a social enterprise, which preserves, supports, and expands Vietnamese traditional paper and papermaking techniques in a sustainable and creative way.

Zó Paper is run by  a dynamic young team who wish to bringtraditional values into contemporary society. In return, their profits are going back into the community of papermakers by creating job opportunities and a stable income for an ethnic minority village in the Northern province of Vietnam.

Denise Jill Marshall runs Blue Skies Above Photography. As a landscape photographer for more than 45 years, her recent work has focused on weaving her photographs, using many different types of photographic printing paper to create new ways for light to interact with image. Through deconstruction. she is able to create a new whole, in her art and in herself. Marshall is motivated by light, color, and the feelings a subject evokes. She often attends photography workshops, where she captures the unique architecture, water, and colors of the places she travels, as well as the surrounding areas in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where she lives.

Lee McDonald is a papermaker with a long history of making tools. He has been involved with paper for over 5 decades, starting in the early years of Twinrocker Handmade Paper, and then moving on to making custom moulds, followed by building beaters, presses, and papermaking dryers. His future projects include ensuring how techniques and tools will be available in the future. McDonald is currently working on personal paper projects in his No Name Yet Paper Mill, along with making the mill available to artists – reach out if you’re in the Boston area.

Naomi J. Kendall is an artist based in Somerset in the UK. She completed a Foundation Course at Cheltenham School of Art, pursued a degree in Art History at Leicester University and received a postgraduate diploma at Manchester University in Gallery and Museum Studies. After a career working in galleries and running community arts projects, she returned to making her own work. In 2022 she was the Evolver Magazine Prize winner, she’s a member of the Paper Artist Collective and is featured as a master artisan in the Michelangelo Foundation’s Homo Faber Guide. In 2024, she was accepted as a member of the Royal West of England Artist Network.

Originally from Mexico City, via California, and South Carolina, Paulina Johnson has been immersed in the fields of art and graphic design for over 20 years. She received a joint BFA from the Academy of Art University and the University of San Francisco in 1999. In 2017, she earned an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  Paulina has been an ongoing educator and is currently an exhibiting partner at Pine Moon Fine Art in Steamboat Springs, CO. She lives and works in beautiful Steamboat where she enjoys the mountains with her husband, two growing boys and their pup Murray.

Carole Kunstadt's works often invoke a metaphysical quality. They reference antique books, music manuscripts, maps and artifacts - deconstructing paper and text and using it in metaphorical ways. Through the manipulation of the materials – history, memory and time merge in a hybrid form.

Born in Boston, Kunstadt spent her childhood in a small New England town, received a BFA from the Hartford Art School in Hartford, Connecticut, and continued with postgraduate studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany.

Twelve years ago she re-entered a familiar landscape as in her youth, moving to the Hudson Valley, after spending 35 years in NYC.

Dorothy McGuinness is a contemporary basket weaver who lives and works in Everett, Washington. She took her first basketmaking class in 1987 and has studied basket-weaving techniques that have been handed down through the centuries. Dorothy has worked extensively with Jiro Yonezawa, a contemporary Japanese basket maker and teacher. She discovered her medium of choice in 2000, when she took a workshop with Jackie Abrams, who introduced her to watercolor paper as a basket-weaving material. She now works exclusively in diagonal twills and mad weave, creating contemporary sculptural baskets, and enjoys exploring the interplay of weaving, color, and design in her sculptural woven paper pieces.

Matt LaBoone is an origami artist and papermaker in Orlando, Florida, who has a focus on folding and designing insects as origami subjects, and has developed thin and crisp paper especially suited for folding them. Over the years, LaBoone has found that most commercially available papers, and even many origami specific papers are not well suited for what he likes to design and fold, which is what led him to pursue papermaking.

For many origami folders it can be challenging to learn what paper is suitable for what folds and to understand the papermaking process. LaBoone de-mystifies papermaking on his instagram account (@cabbagepaper), where he documents his process. He stresses that there is a hugevalue in using good quality paper for folding.