A Collaboration: Pandey and Nash "Eclipse"

front and back cover of Hand Papermaking magazine/summer 2019 issue

(with Robert Rauschenberg and Ken Tyler collaborating in France in 1973  on the back cover)

Catherine Nash and Radha Pandey

Eclipse, 2016

10" x 8"

edition of 150 for

Hand Papermaking magazine portfolio 12

"Intergenerationality: Collaborations in Handmade Paper"

Exciting!  On the front cover of the summer 2019 issue of "Hand Papermaking" is the collaborative effort of myself and the talented Radha Pandey: we created an edition of over 150 for the "Intergenerational" portfolio for Hand Papermaking magazine in 2016. Fifteen teams of collaborators worked on the portfolio. 

15 teams of collaborators created editions for 

"Intergenerationality: Collaborations in handmade Paper" portfolio

Hand Papermaking magazine

Order Portfolio 12, Hand Papermaking magazine

Collaboration:  Aesthetic Considerations

As a starting point, we shared our personal art, studio practice, and philosophical interests with each other. 

Catherine 

space 

sky

air

spiritual/science in tandem

geometrical diagrams/sacred geometry superimposed on landscape

experiences of nature

the metaphysics of place and memory

Radha

natural processes of erosion, sedimentation how one affects the other.  
water to soil to water

ownership of land - borders/mapping - 
      how changed over time vs. physically as a natural landscape

depth 

under the surface

Discussing the possibilities for collaboration, we discovered common ground in our artistic content as it relates to earth, water, and air, both scientifically and poetically. Eclipse explores a blended interpretation of the concepts we are engaged with in our own work as individual artists and papermakers.

The tangible dialogues of the elements of space and sky, water and soil, together in tandem with human interactions with our planet conjured up ideas of:

• boundaries
• land ownership
• a human experience of nature and in nature
• the metaphysics of place and memory
• the natural processes of erosion, sedimentation
• the physical landscape and its relationship to the mental landscape.

These ideas became the focus of our collaborative piece. Whittling down these concepts to their essence, we utilized our materials as the way to carry metaphor. Our collaborative work unfolded in a unique way: as we spoke together about our individual interests in materials and processes, the piece evolved to embody our shared concerns, materializing differently from how we would create individually.  

Radha and Catherine hand pounding cooked/rinsed gampi bark fiber in prep for our edition. 

The Morgan Conservatory of Paper in Cleveland graciously let us use their facilities! Thank you, Morgan!

Collaboration:  Technical Details

We undertook our collaborative portfolio project at the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory in Cleveland, Ohio in June of 2016, using hand and naginata beaten gampi bark as a paper fiber, internal colorants of filtered and ground earth samples from Sedona, AZ, as well as wax and a watercolor paint derived from earth minerals. Our processes included nagashizuki (Japanese-style) sheet-forming, pulp painting, external dyeing, paper cutting, and stitching to create a cohesive artwork that expresses our shared vision.

Our collaborative three days working together in Ohio came to an end and we divided up the remaining surface tasks between the two of us.  Back in my studio, I (Catherine) printed two wax circles on each sheet. With a very wide Oriental hake brush, I painted a bokashi [gradation] wash onto each sheet using a special watercolor paint made of dark blue sodalite. When all were dry, I carefully ironed out the excess wax out of the sheets leaving a wonderful resultant darker circle. I mailed the edition in process back to Radha in Cleveland. 

Edition of "Eclipse" in progress

The satisfaction of a complete edition!

Radha cut a smaller circle out from within the waxed circle below the horizon to bring part of the “earth” up into the “sky”. Painting them with several coats of the same blue sodalite paint, she brought forth a rich contrast so that the “earth moon” stood out in the “sky.” PVA glue was used to adhere the circles to the sheets using a template to help place the circles in the same spot on each sheet. 


 It was a great honor to work with my friend and colleague, the talented artist and papermaker Radha Pandey.  We are so grateful to Hand Papermaking magazine for this wonderful opportunity!  Thank you!

Catherine Nash and Radha Pandey

Eclipse, 2016

10" x 8"

edition of 150 for

Hand Papermaking magazine portfolio 12

"Intergenerationality: Collaborations in Handmade Paper" 

Bios

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 was a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She has Western, Eastern and Islamic-world Papermaking techniques with Timothy Barrett and teaches book arts classes in India, Europe and the US.

Her graduate thesis work- a hand-printed book of botanical anatomies titled Anatomia Botanica won the MICA Book Award at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair in 2014, and received an Honorable Mention at the 15th Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design.

In 2018, her book Deep Time won the Joshua Heller Memorial Award at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair.  Her artists books are held in over 40 public and private collections internationally, including the Library of Congress and Yale University.

Currently, Radha is working on an artist book inspired by Mughal miniature paintings of botanicals from the 17th century, for which all the paper will be hand made in the traditional Indo-Islamic style.

Radha will be leading an exciting arts tour in India of "behind the scenes of various working artists and craftspeople" from Dec. 19, 2020 - Jan. 2nd, 2021.   Please visit her blog at  Rice - Paper - Tree  for more information and to get on her mailing list.
View her art at https://www.radhapandey.com.

Catherine Nash is an artist who freely mixes media in her work to express her ideas.  Specializing in Japanese and Western hand papermaking, encaustic painting and mixed media drawing, Nash is a teaching artist who balances her studio work with artist-in-resident teaching, lectures and workshops across the United States, as well as in professional studios and universities in eight European countries, Canada, Australia and Japan.  She has published 4 educational DVDs on the art of papermaking and has just self published a book that surveys international artists entitled “Authentic Visual Voices” that includes her interviews with 28 international artists about their creative ideas.   Her work has been included by invitation into numerous national and international exhibitions, most recently in Brazil, Chile, Tasmania, England, and France.  Her love of travel and different cultures has inspired her to live, exhibit, research and teach on four continents.

After receiving a B.F.A. in Printmaking and Drawing from the University of New Hampshire in 1980, Nash spent a year and a half creating prints and drawings in Paris.  In 1987, she graduated from the University of Arizona with a Masters of Fine Arts in Mixed Media. Two independently designed research trips to Japan enabled Nash to study the techniques of Japanese woodblock printing and papermaking in depth. From 1996-2002, her extensive research in Italy and Scandinavia increased her knowledge of historical and contemporary Western papermaking and paper arts.  Nash has combined encaustic waxes and filtered earth pigments with her handmade paper works since 1994.

The landscape, aesthetics and cultures of Japan, the rich gradations and spaciousness of Scandinavian summer night skies, experiences with Native American friends and her explorations into the wilderness of the southwestern deserts have deeply influenced and informed her work.

www.catherinenash.com

Kyoko Ibe at the LACMA thru Nov 29, '11

Ibe-Kyoko, Hogosho
129-x-147.5-cm
collection-of-the artist
©Ibe-Kyoko

"Paper is so beautiful. It shows its beauty texturally when it is between the eyes and light. When we see the fiber in paper it is alive, moving. Paper is light, weightless, freely floating in space. It is a gift from nature." - Kyoko Ibe

I visited Kyoko Ibe in her Kyoto studio in 1987 and it was a magical, inspirational opportunity. I've loved her work ever since...I deem her an international treasure for all.



Last week I was lucky enough to see Kyoko Ibe's solo show in the Japanese Pavillion wing of the LA County Museum of Art, (LACMA). One walks up the organically sinuous, spiraling walkway of Frank Gehry's design, past scrolls and screens that date back eight hundred years or more. The sumi brushstrokes and the sparing compositions have always called to my heart, not to mention that very particular 12thc. carved wood buddha statue that gives me chills every time I stand in front of it....which I do whenever I am in town.


The moving contemporary art of Kyoko Ibe is completely at home in this space of light and quietude, side by side with centuries of her heritage. There is a simplicity to the work that instantly draws one in and the poetic translation of her personal experiences resonate with me. It speaks of the transience of nature and relationships. In one work, "Once Upon a Time" Ibe has embedded letters from her mother and documents removed from the family Buddhist altar: documents that had accumulated within the altar since it was made in the 19th century. A museum label aptly describes this work to have"...an equivalently profound connection with past and present lives".



I loved what the museum wrote about her techniques in papermaking: "Ibe's purpose in making her works is to convey the miraculous strength of natural processes, allowing materials born of nature - plant fibers and water - to do their work with little direct intervention from her. Having decades of experience, she finds ways to encourage the pulp..." into her quietly moving, yet grandiose in scale works of paper.

"The power of nature is so often beyond what people can control. Harnessing that power is part of Ibe-san’s expression. Having laid bits of documents, chips of mica, flakes of gold or silver, recycled indigo paper, and other precious materials onto the paper screen, she then begins to apply paper pulp behind that surface. As she adds layers and layers of various colored pulps of recycled paper behind those, some dense with calligraphy so they take on the color of gray sumi, others pink from the vermillion of seals used to sign a document, colors merge onto the surface and fibers bind with the elements already applied. Layer upon layer of pulp is added with great quantities of water, and Ibe-san relinquishes control, allowing the water to rearrange paper fibers and draw pulp into various patterns. The power of water and the strength of plants inspire this work, while the people whose writings are merged into her paper she feels to be living again through traces of their words." - Hollis Goodall, curator, Japanese Art

This exhibition is part of a larger two year project entitled Recycling: washi tales, a performance installation that was commissioned by Krannert Center of the University of Illinois. If you had great fortune, you caught a performance entitled Recycling: Washi Tales, with four stories drawn from reuse of special paper, sets, and costume all by Ibe Kyoko on September 22 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in conjunction with this exhibition of Kyoko Ibe's work. Through the whole performance washi is being made on stage.  Hiromi Paper's (Santa Monica, CA) blog is just wonderful for those of us unable to have caught such an exciting production.  Here is the link to their description of the LA performance with a more in depth description of the four stories and photos.

Japan’s Intangible Cultural Treasure otsuzumi drummer Okura Shonosuke from the Kanze Noh Theater, whose family has been performing noh drumming since the 16th century, were among the elite participants in this performance. Directed and written by Elise Thoron from New York, other performers include dancer/actor Karen Kandel, biwa lute player Arai Shisui, specialist in ancient chant and dance Sakurai Makiko, and actor Soeda Sonoko.

Washi Tales: The Paper Art of Ibe Kyoko
Pavilion for Japanese Art, Level 3
LA County Museum of Art
September 1, 2011–November 29, 2011

Black Sun being created. Images from Kyoko Ibe's website:





















Want to know more about Japanese papermaking techniques? I found this wonderful photo compilation : they are photos of paper maker Tamura Tadashi in Kyoko Ibe’s studio (Nishiyama, Kyoto) and at the Awagami Factory (Shikoku) taken by Elise Thoron on Asian Cultural Council fellowship May-June, 2009.

Hiroki Morinoue, artist & master printer

It had been 12 years since I'd opened my box of Japanese woodblock tools....Last week, I dusted the lid and peered inside. An immediate longing for the smell of carved wood came over me. Hmmmm, perhaps it is time again.

In 1987, on my first of two research trips to Japan, I studied washi (traditional Japanese papermaking) and moku hanga (Japanese woodblock printing). My focus in the following years, gradually leaned towards papermaking/paper sculpture, but the moku hanga techniques I'd learned were translated into mixed media drawings and large sumi paintings. By '98 I was painting with encaustics and embedding my papers/paintings into these molten wax paintings while always continuing to make washi works. Lately I've been monoprinting with encaustic but that's pretty painterly.

I have never forgotten that my roots began in printmaking....it's just felt like it's been put to the back burner. Does one ever completely lose the thinking pattern of a printmaker once ingrained?

I was so excited when I heard that PaperWorks: The Sonoran Collective for Paper and Book Artists was hosting artist and master printer Hiroki Morinoue from the big island of Hawaii to teach 2 days of moku hanga in Tucson. Morinoue would then travel to teach 2 days of experimental abstract watercolor at the Tubac Center for the Arts just 60 minutes south. Hey! Time to shake myself up, and spark a new creative flow!! I whittled out time in my schedule to take all four days.

In his artist statement, Hiroki Morinoue writes: "In all of my works, there is a compelling sense of place---of the shoreline, rocks, lava flows and skies of the Big Island. I have long been a patient observer of nature, in particular, of its rhythms, cycles, and patterns. My creativity is two-fold, one to express myself and the other to express and study different media most suited for the message I want to convey to the viewer."

Morinoue's work speaks to me through color, his personal iconography and references to nature.

Watching Morinoue go through a step by step demo of the very special Japanese techniques of woodblock printing with water based inks (in his case, straight from the tube watercolor paint slightly diluted, and blended with rice paste on the block) was like taking a drink of water after a long drought.

There are a few steps missing here to keep it relatively short, but it gives an idea:
Morinoue printed 9 colors on this demo piece, some multiple times to deepen the color and/or add a gradation.

...

But when he started printing from varied blocks in a more intuitive manner creating woodblock printed monoprints, I was enthralled. Although Morinoue demoed carving and registration, our hands on focus was with trying to control the printing. We had access to a slew of pre-carved blocks. He explained that the light source is the paper, and to keep in mind that with each printing, we were subtracting light...

The idea of printing freely from numerous blocks, overlapping colors and shapes to create unique images was truly an ah-ha moment for me. I totally appreciated the freedom and spontaneity of this manner of printing.

I am sure that other printmakers might have a different feeling, but my training and subsequent approach to printmaking, not only in Japan but also during the 14 years prior as well, was very controlled and preplanned....and this was precisely why I turned towards mixing media that would allow for unrehearsed, more spontaneous creation so to speak. I wanted the work to lead me sometimes, to have a conversation with it. Does that make sense?

At the end of the two days, our trimmed prints were pinned into a grid, truly a visual delight. We were asked to trade cropped images and reconfigure them into a new composition. A wonderful exercise and energetic way to end the workshop. Morinoue was adept at critique and offered pertinent suggestions and thoughts. He told me, "You should really consider being a printmaker!" I guess one just can't fully lose the mindset. And yes, I am one. Remember that, Nash. I'm pulling the pot from the back to the front burner~

The watercolor course in Tubac was just superb as well: totally fun (especially sharing the adventure with my friend Mabel), and I certainly learned a great deal, particularly about Morinoue's approach to color. As the painting techniques paralleled my own practice with sumi and watercolor painting, it didn't have quite the impact that holding a baren again had, but nonetheless it was exciting, fresh and still felt new. Perhaps at some level, I had mourned just a bit letting moku hanga go (after longing to go to Japan since I had been seven!...I had been having major issues with Tucson's total lack of humidity and Hiroki gave me some pertinent suggestions on what to do.) I had known it would reappear in my creative work, I just didn't know when.

I have, of late, been integrating handmade paper and cast paper with encaustic...oh, but now I can see doing mokuhanga on my own papers, and dipping them or enhancing them with encaustic monoprinting...for stand alone works or incorporated into artist books. Or carving the wood on which I paint encaustic...hmmmmmmmm.

Ah, that creative flow! So excited to have solid stretches of time before me as we head into the summer.


Throughout the workshops, his wife, artist Setsuko Morinoue was a hard working assistant and we appreciated her help too.
Thank you Hiroki and Setsuko Morinoue!