2020
Handmade paper from linen, raw abaca, and flax fibers, erasure texts, plant blossoms and seeds, found and cut illustrations
15” x 11” x 0.75”
Recent work considers connections between textiles, paper, plants, quilting, and lace making, and concepts including nomenclature, nostalgia, and memory. There is a looking back going on, and also, the thread that links our personal and collective memories to the present to what is to come—the intersections between how we live in the world and how we name things in that world—spines of books and bodies and plants and poems—our desire to name things seemingly in order to understand them. The activities that go into making the work are cooking fibers to forming sheets of paper, writing poems then embedded into those papers as a part of the forming, and, finally, making sense of them through binding or piecing. This series of handmade paper works is made from raw abaca and flax fibers, and family linens from my maternal ancestors. Composing the work as papers were formed is a process of surprise and unknowing, as with placing a ceramic piece in the kiln and waiting to see the final result.
Photography credit: Jenna Bonistalli
Julie Leonard, Iowa City, Iowa