1997 Friends of Dard Hunter Keepsake Exchange

This month’s Artifact of the Month is a selection of artworks exchanged during the October 1997 annual meeting of the Friends of Dard Hunter, now North American Hand Papermakers, in Sonoma, California. 

North American Hand Papermakers is an organization that facilitates knowledge-sharing in the contemporary hand-papermaking community. The organization was founded in 1981 as the Friends of Dard Hunter to assist with the operation of the Dard Hunter Museum of Papermaking in Appleton, Wisconsin. That museum is now the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, and North American Hand Papermakers still supports the museum today. Each year, they hold a keepsake exchange during their conference. Each keepsake collection is a capsule of the diverse paper art styles and innovations at the time. These pieces selected from the 1997 keepsake exchange showcase some of the interesting materials and textures present in the collection. 

Elaine Koretsky's "A Potpourri of Pulp" features humorous text "NO, IT'S NOT DRYER LINT!" on a thick, textured blend of abaca and coagulate. The base paper is grey with a rainbow of colorful inclusions throughout. Elaine Koretsky was a famous paper historian and artist, who founded the Research Institute of Paper History and Technology in 1995. She learned to make paper at the age of 41, and quickly founded her own papermaking studio called "Carriage House Handmade Paperworks" in 1975. The Carriage House was a center of creativity, where she taught artist workshops and brought back knowledge and artifacts from her international papermaking expeditions. Her first book was about papermaking in Burma. Similarly to Dard Hunter, Elaine Koretsky found international travel and paper research to be her passions, and she dedicated her later life to documenting diverse processes in hand papermaking via books and documentaries. Koretsky's presence in this collection of keepsakes is a testament to her dedication to and community involvement in the paper craft until her death in 2018. 

Carol Balliet's “Silk Paper”, Linda McNeil's “Cattails w/ abaca”, and Denise DeMarie's “Onions and Garlic Paper” are all presented together as interesting uses of material and texture in papermaking. Carol Balliet's "Silk Paper" consists of large inclusions of straw and grasses, held together with a thin, long, silk-like fiber. The layered, rough texture of this artifact stood out as different from most conventional paper techniques. Sadly, "Onions and Garlic Paper" does not smell like onions and garlic, but it does elicit a reaction to know that it's made with some of the most ubiquitous plants in culinary history. "Cattails w/ abaca" is interesting because the smooth, plain paper is swimming with tiny, recognizable pieces of cattail. 

Bridget O’Malley and Amanda Degener's “Cave Paper” is a deep, rich, and slightly iridescent blue-purple-black color, thick and rough in texture, which contrasts nicely with Elizabeth Lamb’s light and translucently thin “Partially beaten gampi and daffodil leaves.” The “Cave Paper” look was achieved by dying a sheet of flax and cotton paper with both indigo and a walnut hull stain. This artifact is just one sample of a long-running project by Bridget O’Malley and Amanda Degener from 1994-2020, focused on making durable, stylistic, high-quality papers. The style and name of the Cave Paper was inspired by the studio in which they did most of their work, which was a windowless, cold warehouse basement with towering stone walls. 

The North American Hand Papermakers conference holds a keepsake exchange every year and donates full sets of these keepsakes to the museum. Come back next month for more artifacts from the 1997 conference!