Bamboo Paper Sculptures

Sylvia Schwartz In her structures, silicone molds are cast from both natural and hand-made forms, including clay coils, volcanic rock patterns, seaweed, and the artist’s own fingerprints. Leaving the human trace evident through the repetition of shapes and textures in both the natural and man-made elements, provides a measure of stability, a reference point. These manmade and natural forms merge, revealing our inexplicable dependence on nature. Through this melding of two entities, new life is breathed into the art object. Paper as a primary medium allows Schwartz to sculpt, draw and paint simultaneously. The flow of the pulp (a natural phenomenon in itself) meshes with the molded forms creating a structure that seems to rest on the edge between painting and sculpture. The duality between light and heavy, interior and exterior, planned and accidental, order and chaos, leading ultimately to a sense of life. Red...

Artist Commentary: “Tied”, the title of the installation, is a phonetic pun on the rising tides and the paper pages bound by threads.
As the water rises and falls, pages of our daily...

Eva Ennist, a mixed media and fiber artist, travels extensively through the Far East, gathering materials and techniques for her practice. The sculpture "NE...

Nancy Genn, American (b. 1929) Marshfield 25 (1977) Handmade paper collage Hand signed verso Dimensions: 20 1/8 x 22 inches Utilizing what is now known as the 'Genn Method,' Nancy Genn created three-dimensional abstract works of handmade paper, gaining international recognition in the 1970s Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions. Nancy Genn was born in 1929 in San Francisco, California. She recognized early that she would pursue a career as an artist. Her mother, Ruth Wetmore Thompson Whitehouse, was a painter and UC Berkeley alumna who played a leadership role in the San Francisco Women Artists organization. Genn studied at San Francisco Art Institute (then California School of Fine Arts) with painter Hassel Smith, and at the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley (1948–49) with Professors Margaret Peterson and John Haley, and fellow students Sam Francis and Sonya Rapoport. In 1949 she married Vernon “Tom” Genn, an engineer raised in Japan, with whom she had three children. Career Genn's first noted solo exhibition was in 1955 at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco. She received international recognition through her inclusion in French art critic Michel Tapié’s seminal text Morphologie Autre (1960), which cited her as one of the most important exponents of post-war informal art. In 1961, Genn began creating bronze sculptures using the lost-wax casting method. Influenced by noted sculptor and family friend Claire Falkenstein, who used open-formed structures in her work, Genn cast forms woven from long grape vine cuttings, and produced vessels, fountains, fire screens, a menorah, a lectern, and, notably, the Cowell Fountain (1966) at UC Santa Cruz. In 1963 her sculptural work was exhibited with Berkeley artists Peter Voulkos and Harold Paris in the influential exhibition Creative Casting curated by Paul J. Smith at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York. Genn was one of the first American artists to express herself through handmade paper, first receiving wide recognition via exhibitions at Susan Caldwell Gallery, New York, beginning in 1977, and in traveling exhibitions with Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Francis. In 1978-1979, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and Japan Creative Arts Fellowship, she studied papermaking in Japan, visiting local paper craftspeople, working in Shikenjo studio in Saitama Prefecture, and exhibiting her work in Tokyo. She also learned techniques from Donald Farnsworth...

Eva Ennist, a mixed media and fiber artist, travels extensively through the Far East, gathering materials and techniques for her practice. The sculpture "NE...

This piece is by Korean artist, Jaena Kwon. Her dimensional relief work is concerned with painting components and how painting space is constructed. She treats painting as an image o...

Hand cut paper

Cups "C" - is an one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted, abstract wall sculpture of fine brass wire, employed gesturally, like pencil lines, covered with a soft Japanese paper, creating translu...

Cups "F" - is an one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted, abstract wall sculpture of fine brass wire, employed gesturally, like pencil lines, covered with a soft Japanese paper, creating translu...

Cups "A" - is an one-of-a-kind, hand-crafted, abstract wall sculpture of fine brass wire, employed gesturally, like pencil lines, covered with a soft Japanese paper, creating translu...

“Over the last twenty years, I have put together an extensive amount of research towards the intersections and thresholds between painting, sculpture, and drawing. My aim is to produ...

This purple/lavender piece is by Korean artist, Jaena Kwon. Her dimensional relief work is concerned with painting components and how painting space is constructed. She treats painti...