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“Another season, another reason for making paper”: Collaboration with Peter Thomas of ‘The Wandering Book Artists’

This year, Hand Papermaking Magazine celebrates its 30th anniversary with an Intergenerational Hand Papermaking Portfolio containing collaborative editions crafted by papermakers around the world.

As an emerging practitioner, I was invited to team up with another paper artist who was active in the field around the time that the magazine was founded. Along with fourteen other pairs, we were asked to “partner as equals to explore the interdependence and reciprocity of a constructive relationship between generations.” As put by curator Tatiana Ginsberg: “Our intergenerational experiment seeks to consciously de-emphasize didactic mentor/student dynamics in favor of a creative melding of unique and vital perspectives in contemporary paper. We hope the finished paperworks will convey the spirit of youthful energy interacting on equal footing with the wisdom of experience. Each pair of artists will determine how to express these concepts visually through their work in paper.”

I accepted the invitation to participate, spending little to no time thinking about what artist I would like to work with. Though we’d never met in person, ‘Peter Thomas’ was a familiar name – a name I’d been hearing a lot throughout my Mobile Mill travels; a name attached to a larger traveling book arts project called “The Wandering Book Artists”.

If the social world is based on a theory of six-degrees-of-separation, then I theorize that the book arts world is a one-degree-of-separation situation. The Wandering Book Artists have traveled to and worked with many of the same folks that The Mobile Mill has interacted with while on the road. This ghostly project overlapping is more-or-less coincidental (perhaps due to swimming in a small book arts pond), but regardless of the odds, I find it comforting to know there are other mobile craft practitioners out there roaming about. I continue to be delighted by the idea of a collaborative craft caravan. With all of the solo-traveling I do on my Mobile Mill journeys comes a constant dream of touring as part of a larger craft crew.

The Wandering Book artists are Peter Thomas and his other half, Donna. They tour the country “in beauty” as to sell their handcrafted artist books out of a funky green tow-behind wooden wagon which was built exclusively for their cross-country travels. Modeled after traditional vardo structures, the wagon has made three national tours wherein it primarily serves as a portable living space and a home to Peter and Donna’s artist books. On occasion, the Wandering Book Artists will welcome visitors to tour the inside of their wagon abode, and the two have sang many a ‘Book Arts Folk Songs’ just outside the front (back) door.

Just knowing that Peter and I would have some conceptual overlapping as based on our mobile craft practices was a good enough reason to work with him on the project for Hand Papermaking Magazine. Officially paired up, we made plans for me to travel to Santa Cruz, California to create the edition at Peter’s home studio – which by the way, is right on the beach (oh yeah!).

To make art with another human being is not new to me, but Peter was new to me. That said, we spent the first few days getting to know each other. To be in each other’s heads requires, of course, conversing for hours on end by a fireplace about the broader topics of art theory, creative practice, philosophy, life histories, teaching, performance, and mobile craft. We talked about how we fill our time and why we ride, sharing the details of cities we’ve passed through and swapping stories about the characters we meet along the way. We spoke about where we stop, what we collect, what we eat, bizarre public interactions, the paper equipment we use, where to find/buy/build/fix/modify paper tools, pros and cons of various papermaking materials, favorite pulps, studio successes and mishaps, what supplies we carry along on trips, where we sleep, how to make gas money, and how to sustain a living as an artist. We shared feedback and advice we’ve each been given while on the road, noting the varied souls we’d stumbled upon or met more formally along the way. In the process of traveling out of theory and into practice, we both said there were moments in which we recognized the strong impression our practices had made on others. “I’ll never be the same again” was how one person put it to Peter when encountering the Wandering Book Artists and their wagon.

As we searched for content to put onto the page, we came to realize differences in our art-making styles. In short, I’m a more process-based maker, while Peter is the type who likes to have a plan. Good example: Peter wanted to sketch out specific project outcomes for clean final aesthetic presentation; I wanted to dive right into the work and figure it all out through physical making. As Peter searched for literary inspiration, I sought out a good reason as to why we should just run over the handmade papers with our dirty truck tires as performance art.

A collaborative project is about coming together and compromising. With only a few days to execute an edition of one-hundred-and-fifty we reached a point of ‘less talking, more doing’, proceeding with a loose idea for a multi-layered composition that aimed to capture cross-country movement (a decidedly integral part of our creative practices at this point in time). The final handmade paper we came up with was made by two hands and three moulds, featuring two shaped sheet techniques, two watermark designs, four types of pulp, and a final top off of pulp-spray stenciled imagery. The work represents notions of repeating sequences, cyclical movement, knowledge transfer, and the joint layers of our personal histories with handmade paper craft. 

In the end, the final edition is about not so much about the tangible pieces. Like much of art, the pieces are there to represent the larger ideas. Our product is the result of a happening, a meeting that took place between two California native papermakers of two distinctly different generations. The pages we made together consider how we learn from one another and how any handcraft is kept alive in the process of talking to, and working with, one another.