Going to Turkey – Fulbright grant art project

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artist-in-residency, Fulbright grant, handmade paper, installation, Izmir, Jane Ingram Allen, papermaking, timothy s. allen, Turkey

I am happy to announce that I have received a Fulbright Specialist Grant for an art project in Turkey at Ege University, Museum of Paper and Book Arts, Izmir, Turkey.
I will be flying to Turkey on November 18, 2015 and return to San Francisco on December 16, 2015. For the first week I will be in Istanbul touring some of the sites and seeing art museums and galleries on my own, and then going to Izmir on November 25 for the start of my Fulbright grant project.

Here is a photo showing the outside of the Museum of Paper & Book Arts at Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, and a group of visiting students.

During the 20-day Fulbright Specialist grant in Izmir, I will be exploring the plants around Izmir to use for my papermaking art and creating some new artworks using local materials and inspired by the place. I will also teach papermaking workshops at the Ege Univerisity Musuem of Paper and Book Arts and consult with the Museum and the university about curriculum in paper arts and environmental art.  I will also help them to set up a papermaking studio or workshop at the Museum.  I will also have an exhibition of my handmade paper artworks at EgeArt 2015, an international art festival held in Izmir from Dec. 11-13, 2015.  My exhibition will include some of the handmade paper “site maps” I have created in other residencies around the world, including during my 2004 and 2005 Fulbright grant projects in Taiwan and a 2010 artist in residency project in Bali, Indonesia.  Here are some photos of a Taiwan Site Map and a Bali Site Map.

I know the Paper & Book Arts Museum in Turkey through my international art project “One World Many Papers” that was a collaborative paper artwork I created with artists from around the world.  I asked the participating artists to send me a sheet of paper they made to represent their country and then I joined all the sheets of paper together to make a large map of the world having no political borders.  The finished piece was donated to the Paper & Book Arts Museum in Turkey at Ege Univeristy, Izmir, in 2011, shortly after the museum opened.  Before getting its permanent home in Turkey, this artwork was seen in exhibitions around the world in 2009 and 2010.  Here is a photo of the finished artwork.  For more information about my “One World – Many papers Project” please visit my other Blog: http://www.janeingramallenart.blogspot.com

I will be posting on this WordPress Blog more about the work I do in Izmir.  Please check back later in November for photos of the places I see and the artwork I make during this art project in Turkey. My husband Timothy S. Allen is going with me to Turkey, and he will be taking lots of photos to document my work and also photos of our experiences in Turkey. His Blog is at http://allentimphotos2.wordpress.com

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My Interview with Taiwanese artist Yi-Chun Lo in ART RADAR ASIA

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art radar asia, banana peels art, Contemporary Art International, installation, Yi-Chun Lo

view of “Banana Justice” installation by Yi-Chun Lo at CAI Gallery, Acton, MA

In this week’s edition of the online journal ART RADAR ASIA you can see my interview with Taiwanese artist Yi-Chun Lo. Yi-chun is currently an artist in residence in Acton, Massachusetts at Contemporary Art International, and has been creating a site-specific installation all with banana peels. Check the interview and lots of photos of Yi-chn’s newest works at http://artradarjournal.com/2014/12/05/taiwanese-artist-yi-chun-lo-talks-bananas-and-economics-interview/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=taiwanese-artist-yi-chun-lo-talks-bananas-and-economics-interview&from=feedblitz_403966_4864629
Yi-Chun was one of the artists I selected for the 2010 Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project, and she created an outdoor installation with bamboo and oyster shells titled “Listening.” For more information about the Cheng Long Wetlands environmental art project take a look at the Blog at http://artproject4wetland.wordpress.com
Entries for the 2015 art project in Cheng Long are due by January 16, 2015.

“Healing the Earth” installation 2 months later

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handmade paper, installation, Nan Hua University, Prayer Flags

Prayer Flags at Nan Hua University “Healing the Earth” Installation Surviving Well After Three Months

These photographs show how the 250 handmade paper prayer flags created for my “Healing the Earth” installation are surviving after 2 months. When I returned to Nan Hua University to make a presentation for the school’s International Biodiversity Day celebration on May 23, I had a chance to visit the installation again and see how the artwork was changing over time. The students told me that the weather has been very rainy and windy during the months since the artwork was installed on March 22.   It is amazing to see how well the handmade paper has survived. The colors have faded somewhat and some flags have fallen to the ground and been dissolved into compost, but most are still “hanging in there”. The students and I made the paper pulp for the flags from paper mulberry bark and dyed the pulp with liquid fiber reactive dye. The handmade paper sheets were formed on A-4 size Western-style moulds and done in the Asian or Japanese way with multiple dips and using formation aid in the vat. This seems to produce very strong paper that lasts well through wind and heavy rainstorms.

You can see earlier entries on this Blog when the prayer flags installation was first put up and also see photos of the process of creating “Healing the Earth”. 

I hope the students at Nan Hua University will send some more photos in a few months to show how the installation continues to change over time.

Making Trees

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installation, Oregon, papermaking, pulp, sculpture, Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, Sitka Spruce, trees

During my artist in residency at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology from Oct. 16, 2013 – January 10, 2014, one of the things I have been working on is a multi-part installation of suspended handmade paper sculptures inspired by the tall Sitka Spruce trees in the area.  We took a trip up into the national forest land nearby and saw a whole forest of the tall evergreen trees, and the atmosphere was very special.  We were told that these trees came back after a big fire in the 1960s that destroyed most of the trees.  It is a wonderful place, and I wanted to create an installation of many trees that would be made from the materials of the place.  The handmade paper is made from Sitka Spruce bark collected there and prepared at the Sitka Center studio where I am working now.  The bark from these trees is easy to collect from the ground around the trees because chunks of bark fall off from the birds or other animals or the tree just shedding.  I also found one tree nearby that had been trimmed and was able to collect some bark there.  The other pulp used for these trees is from the marsh or wetlands in the Salmon River Estuary that is nearby the Sitka Center.  The plant I used is the Sitka Sedge, and I collected some leaves from this sedge and prepared it into pulp.  When I cooked and beat this one to a pulp, I was so excited that it was a beautiful green color that looked just like the moss growing on the Sitka Spruce trees.  Even thought the pulp dries to a lighter tan color it is still a good contrast to the very dark rich brown of the Sitka Spruce pulp.  These photos were taken by Timothy S. Allen and one shows me making a tree in the Boyden Studio space at the Sitka Center, and the other photo shows a couple of them hanging in the space.  I plan to keep making more trees and make as many as I can during the residency and then find a place to install them for an exhibition.