Inside the Studio

A clean sheet of paper, as a place to begin, is both full of possibilities and loaded with expectations. I often think about what might happen when the expected starting point has already begun, just a bit, from a sterile, blank state.

With this in mind, I was excited to collaborate with Kansas City papermaker Kelse Pike of Sustainable Paper+Craft on a new collection of hand-pulled papers. Made with natural fibers and archival pigments, these papers give a unique starting point for anything that begins with a sheet of fresh paper.

Published in December 2025, the “Sunset to Moonrise” collection of papers reflects on my experiences throughout the year. Highlights of my year included hikes in Colorado, beach time on the Maryland coast, neighborhood walks in foggy weather, and many sunsets through the rear view mirror.

Woven into these memories were moments of wonder found at a conservatory and aquarium, rock and mineral shows, and mountainside wildflowers.

Making these papers in the Fall season influenced the feel of the collection, with colors building on one another while seeming to glow from within.

As you read this post, you’ll see images of these moments alongside this paper collection as it was formed in the studio. I’ve also included a bit about my history with papermaking, which began almost 30 years ago.

In 1998, I took a Japanese papermaking course with Mina Takahashi at Penland School of Crafts. At the time, Mina was the Executive Director of Dieu Donné in New York, and she is now the Editor of Hand Papermaking Magazine.

In this course, I learned how to make handmade papers from start to finish using kozo and gampi, and a variety of nontraditional natural fibers. For our papers, we searched out roadside “Alabama Kozo” and processed it fresh in the studio; we used pineapple tops from the cafeteria; and we used mica, which is locally abundant in the North Carolina mountains. We learned the differences between dye and pigment in coloring paper fibers, we tried an indigo bath, and we used found objects, such as a large rusty sheet of metal, to create colors and textures on our handmade papers.

I learned so much from this class, and a few years later, when I became a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, I was able to share my knowledge through teaching papermaking courses at KCAI.

About a year after I took Mina’s class at Penland, I was invited to work as a studio intern at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. The very first thing I did at WSW was to participate in their first paper-fiber harvest and process these plants into paper.

WSW planted flax and kenaf at a community-supported farm in New Paltz, NY. I only have a few photos of what this first season of the seed-to-paper process looked like, but in these images, you can see the farm plot and WSW team harvesting, the stack of unprocessed kenaf, and the outdoor studio that I used to cook down these fibers and begin processing them into paper.

All-in-all, this was an arduous and also rewarding journey. I dove in headfirst, making plenty of mistakes along the way. Ultimately, a few months later, when I successfully pulled a few sheets of the flax and kenaf papers, I felt like I had climbed a mountain and reached the summit. The papers were not perfect, but they were grounded in much dedication and care, and they pointed to an exciting new direction for the studio and the paper artists who worked there.

Fast-forward to the Sustainable Paper+Craft studio in Kansas City in Fall 2025, where Kelsey Pike and I decided to create a unique handmade paper collection. In our initial conversations, we decided to make layered papers reminiscent of my ‘Enclusions’ series of paintings and collages.

After I selected a color palette for the collection and drew multiple shapes to size for the layered compositions, Kelsey invented a process to make these unique layered papers. Within a couple of weeks’ time, Kelsey and her studio assistant, Moll Caffey, had mixed and colored all of the paper pulp and pulled 40-60 of each shape in a variety of colors.

On assembly day, the square backing sheet was freshly made, and I placed each circle piece by hand, completing the custom composition.

This created a circular dance of sorts in the studio; a fresh square sheet would be pulled and couched onto the damp blankets by one person, while another carefully lifted the first color shape for placement, handing it to me with minimal movement to the delicate, unpressed paper. I then placed each shape by hand, creating unique compositions that speak towards both play and balance.

Kelsey has a monthly paper subscription in which she sells artist-led, limited edition collections of unique handmade papers. She generously shared some of the papers for me to sell on my website, too, which you can find at this link.

The photos that follow tell the story of how this work came together in color, shape, and form. From behind-the-scenes studio processes to ephemeral moments in the world I experienced this year, these visual notes chronicle the Sunset to Moonrise – Paper Collection.

All in all, there are eight different color arrangements in the cornerstone compositions, “Sunset” and “Moonrise”. Six more singular sheets round out the collection in the palette I chose, some with textures and multiple colors, and some as solid colors.