Thank you Emily & Genevieve for giving to our January indiegogo campaign! We just finished making the recycled paper hearts for your rewards. Your support means the world to us!
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Here's a look back at 2014 from Jenn. At the beginning of this year, I bought a notebook. Seems like a funny thing for a papermaker to do, but sometimes you want to use regular old, lined, spiral-bound paper that is totally ordinary and free of any preciousness. I'm about halfway through the notebook now. Flipping through it there are diagrams for building a portable press, seemingly endless calculations for keeping track of the amount of papers made for clients, to-do lists, goal lists, grant proposal ideas, brainstorming, exhibition planning, paper recipes, illustration ideas, supply order lists, fundraising ideas, notes on the Friends of Dard Hunter conference we attended in San Francisco, syllabus planning for a drawing class I taught at PCC, syllabus planning for classes I will teach next year at PCC, PR contact lists, notes and plans for residency artists, education outreach ideas, demo ideas, lists of businesses to contact about selling our papers and/or products, and new class ideas. All of these words and numbers add up to a year I'm pretty proud of. We've had so many experiences, grown, streamlined, questioned and dreamed. Every mark is a step towards where we are right now. As the calendar changes and I move into the next half of my notebook, I'm wondering how things will look another year from now. This time last year I was unsure of when I'd be able to quit my day job and start working at the studio full-time. Six months later I was taking the plunge and today I'm still working towards making ends meet. It's been pretty tight, but as long as we continue to grow we'll make it work. As I look back there's been so many enthusiastic students, clients, fellow artists, friends and family who have invested their time, energy, and money in our studio. A HUGE THANK YOU to each and every one of you! Without your support we wouldn't be here, looking back. See you next year! This month Jenn had the pleasure of working with artist Pat Boas as our third participant in our Combined Studio Residency with the c3:initiative. Pat explored a variety of techniques using cotton rag, cotton linter, and abaca. Focusing on ideas about the activity of reading, she used a palette of blacks, blues and whites to create works that play with the two dimensional plane. We can't wait to share more of Pat's work with you and will be sure to let you know where you can see her work around Portland and beyond.
This October Jenn had the pleasure of working with artist Palmarin Merges in our studio as our second participant in our Combined Studio Residency with the c3:initiative. Palmarin works primarily with printmaking techniques so she brought in some of her old prints to recycle in our beater and make into new shaped and watermarked handmade papers. Over the course of about 40 hours Palmarin explored different types of iconography via watermarks (text, abstract images, floor plans) and started to form an idea of how she might use these pieces in a larger art installation. She also made a giant paper balloon ball- more pics. to come of that soon! We can't wait to share Palmarin's completed work with you next year and will keep you posted on when/where you can see her art around Portland and beyond.
Over the past week both Gary and I have had colds so studio work came mostly to a halt. I'm feeling a bit better today so thought I'd take advantage of my convalescing time to catch up on the trajectory of leaving my day job back at the end of June and how things have gone thus far. I'm not going to lie, it's been a bumpy ride. Orders and students have come in fits and starts. While the overall pace of things has definitely picked up over the last several months, the money side of things is still very uneven. I knew that being self employed would come with no financial guarantee, so had prepared myself as much as possible. I do my best not to let a sense of desperation take hold if things are looking tight, but to try and problem solve about how to make the money come in a natural and unforced fashion. Figuring out how to best get the word out about our classes and custom order offerings can be a challenge when you don't have a marketing budget and are an introvert. Our best way to reach people is word of mouth, so if you've taken a class, or bought our paper, please tell people you know. And for all of you who have helped spread the word- THANK YOU! It means the world to us. ------------------------------ Last Thursday we got on a plane bound for San Francisco, CA for the first time. Though we have several friends in the Bay Area, limited time and money have kept us from heading down to visit. This was a business related trip to attend the 2014 Joint Annual Conference of The American Printing History Association and The Friends of Dard Hunter, called Paper on the Press. We were able to attend the conference as scholarship recipients, so we only had to fund our travel and accommodations. Luckily some dear friends were able to put us up at their home in Oakland, and our dear parents were able to sponsor our airfare. We hit the ground running on Thurs. evening attending a reception, tour and keynote speech at the Internet Archive. If you haven't heard of this non-profit you should definitely check them out as they have FREE, fascinating and helpful research tools. They are building a digital library and other cultural artifacts, such as TV news programs, in digital forms. After we had a wonderful guided tour from the Director of the Television Archive, Roger MacDonald, we heard the conference keynote speech from the founders of Twinrocker, Kathryn and Howard Clark. Their slide presentation detailing their beginnings in San Francisco and on to the founding of their studio in Indiana was inspirational. They ended their talk with one of Kathryn's favorite quotes, "You can't fail if you don't quit." What excellent and truthful advice! The following gallery of photos is from our evening at the Internet Archive. On Friday we joined up with fellow conference goers for a tour of Magnolia Editions in Oakland. The charismatic and knowledgeable Donald Farnsworth took us through a whirlwind tour of woodblock prints being made with Ed Hardy, a huge subway tile installation made in collaboration with Chuck Close, a 3D printing demo. of an historic watermark recreated in plastic, and much, much more. We felt like kids in a candy shop soaking up all the art and experimentation happening in every nook and cranny of the space. Donald and his team are amazing and we were super jealous of their wonderful "toys." After the Magnolia tour we headed in to San Francisco with a friend to check out the Ferry Building and grab some food before heading over to a reception for the 2014 Annual Members Exhibition, and studio tour of 1890 Byrant Street Studios. There was wonderful artwork from papermakers and printers around the country, and it was fun to see some printing in action while Howard Clark lead everyone in a hootenanny sing along with Peter Thomas that got the toes tapping. Then we headed over to our volunteer shift (part of earning our scholarship keep) helping put together this year's keepsake packets of papers (including the 200 we made.) Gary personally stuffed each and every keepsake envelope! Saturday we headed out to Mills College in Oakland, enjoying a day of panelists sharing their knowledge on a wide range of topics such as how technology supports the creative process, how papermaking can be used for therapeutic healing and economic empowerment, how to hack inkjet printers to create more hands on images, how to grow and harvest flax for papermaking, and how a project called the Drinkable Book is bringing clean drinking water to developing areas. All of the panels we attended were packed with information and we learned a ton! The conference ended with a delicious Mediterranean style banquet and silent auction to raise funds for next year's scholarship recipients (a very worthy cause that we're grateful for!) Below are a few photos of our quick excursions out to Muir Woods and Golden Gate before heading back to Portland on Sunday. We so enjoyed putting faces to names in the real world, and had a wonderful experience attending our first conference. We've come back to our studio with a renewed sense of purpose and percolating ideas.
We place central importance on bringing eco-friendly, high quality goods into existence, as do many other businesses in Portland. As the studio continues to evolve we are excited to connect with more artists, artists, businesses and organizations who share our design ethos.
Over the last month Jenn had the pleasure of working with artist Mami Takahashi in our studio as our first participant in our Combined Studio Residency with the c3:initiative. Having had a bit of experience with papermaking, Mami dove right into an exploration of fibers, trying out cotton, crocosmia, overbeaten abaca, Thai Kozo, and Japanese Kozo. Over the course of about 40 hours Mami honed her understanding of these types of fibers and how they can be incorporated into her art practice. We can't wait to share Mami's completed work with you next year and will keep you posted on when/where you can see her art around Portland and beyond.
Last week a client brought in some cedar bark strips for us to try out and make some sample papers. We've never hand pounded a fiber before so it truly was an experiment for us, and we couldn't be more pleased with the results! The dry paper color is close to a rich walnut, it's hard to capture with our phone camera. Here are the steps we went through for those that would like to know. (In the future we'll put info. like this on the papermaking wiki that we're developing.)
It's officially Back to School season and it seems like everyone is trying to squeeze as much summer fun out of August as they can. At the studio we're taking stock of what the heck we've been up to and evaluating the highs and lows. Over the past 2 months we've participated in the Mississippi Street Fair, Portland's first Urban Air Market, the Alberta Street Fair, and the Hawthorne Evening Market. We also taught a 2-day workshop at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology and kicked off our studio incubator relationship with the c3:initiative with an Open House. In other words this has been the summer of throwing ourselves into promoting the studio instead of camping, cleaning, or working in our yard- in the hopes that we can build our community and keep the momentum going into the rainy days ahead. Now that Jenn is self employed at the studio this momentum is more important than ever. While the street fair circuit brought us a huge audience, it didn't bring us much $$. We chalk it up to unusually warm temperatures, and and overabundance of merchandise choices. In the future we'll likely focus on vending at curated indoor markets and getting our retail goods into local businesses via wholesale orders. Next summer we'd like to do more demos at farms, museums, and public spaces. Ideally we would collect plants and fibers from said locations and have a mobile paper mill to make paper on site. We'd blog about the demos along the way and build a paper recipe database on our soon to be built papermaking wiki website. Then all we'd need is a faster, more portable beater- want to help us get one? One of our goals as we head into the fall is to continue to build relationships with businesses, artists and makers. We've had some great custom order opportunities, soon we'll start working with artists in our new combined studio residency program with the c3:initiative in Sept., our open call handmade paper postcard exhibition opens on Sept. 5, and in mid-Sept. we're making space and earth paper at the OMSI Mini-Maker Faire. There's been little time to catch our breaths and take in the beauty of summer in Oregon so we too are going to try and squeeze in some summer fun over the coming weeks. Next weekend we'll head out to a group papermaking retreat with the Western Gathering of Papermakers on Whidbey Island. We've never been to the retreat before, or to the island, and will be doing some camping on the host's property. Needless to say, we're super excited to meet some fellow papermakers and get out into the wilderness. As we wrap up this post we have a few requests. If you haven't signed up for our e-newsletter and want to keep up to date with our events, classes and projects- please go sign-up! And if you've been thinking about reaching out to us about a custom order, private group class, or even a project that you'd like to explore- send us an email. We want the studio to be a community resource for folks both in our local community, and our global community. Thanks for your support and here's to the last rays of summer! |
The StudioPulp & Deckle is a handmade papermaking studio located in Oregon. Archives
September 2023
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