Uncensored: January in Oberlin

Right before this post, I wrote a milquetoast version of what January 2026 entailed. Remember also what was going down in the sordid history of this country, which I could barely process. This is going to be the "explicit" version of my Jan, a relentless start to the year.

Let's begin with a giant blessing/disruption: the walls. Last summer, I suggested that we mount laminate panels onto the unfinished drywall directly outside of the studio. This project got lost in the shuffle and by the time I tried to revive it, we were too close to end of year, though my library colleagues tried valiantly to get this done before class began. Due to red tape, guess what I saw on the first day of class, a Monday? A contractor mudding the wall. He said the laminate would be up by Wed. Perfect timing!

How silly of me to believe a project like this would proceed speedily. Turns out the walls had to be finished completely before any laminate could go up. That involved sanding, priming, and painting two coats of the walls from floor to ceiling, which meant noise and enormous amounts of dust directly outside the studio. I had to keep our doors closed, and our tiny space turned into a steam room.

The contractors were courteous and friendly, but because of confusion around getting the right laminate, everything was delayed by a week. By the time the walls were done, students no longer needed them.

The upside: it's perfect, looks great, and this is before the baseboard went in. It will make subsequent classes easier, and I chose a height to hang that will provide something for everyone, from tall to short. By the end of the last week of class, the drybox mount popped off again, so I called Bill for a repair, which fell early on the following Monday...when my car started to malfunction. This sent me into PTSD mode from last year, when my car failed in a much bigger way on the last day of class, forced an extra stay, delayed a residency, and cancelled a trip. I booked a date with the local mechanic, but it weirdly started to resolve after a week so I kept my car because it became too cold and snowy to be carless.

The weather became a very powerful character this month. We had two snow days, though my students valiantly worked the entirety of the first one. I stay in a house on the edge of campus for the month, as I would never commute this time of year. However, it became apparent after a couple of weeks of heavy space heater reliance that something was wrong with the furnace. The thermostat in my space was 57 degrees F and wouldn't get past 59 on its own. When the emergency furnace guy said that the house needed a new one, I had to find a new place to stay for nearly the last week (I also had to change rooms in the middle of my stay to accommodate scholars arriving from overseas). I turned to my most stalwart colleague and generous friend: Ed, the special collections librarian who spearheaded the studio space and class over a decade ago. Here he is shoveling.

Ed and his wife Kim took me in without hesitation and kept me warm and safe while they did all of the heavy work. They are Canadian and remarkably fit, so the task of shoveling, which seems completely body breaking to me, is like taking a short walk to them. While they were outside doing this, I was laying in bed trying to recover from many sleepless nights (a mix of trying to warm up under 6 layers of blankets, perimenopause, overstimulation from teaching, accepting visits to class, and going out almost every night because I revert to some kind of weird college kid schedule when I'm living on campus and have a lot of friends in town). 

The pall of death came over the month quickly. These are Mattias' book samples that he made from the handmade papers by the late Stephen DeSantis, which his sister donated to Oberlin. Stephen and I overlapped at grad school in Chicago for a year, and while he was older than many of us, his death felt very untimely last year. In the first week of class, a childhood friend's mother suffered a massive stroke. I wanted immediately to call a different childhood friend, though I couldn't because cancer killed her over 20 years ago. The second week of class, my friend's mom died. Last year, four friends lost their fathers. But this is the first big parental loss of friends I grew up with, people that I knew and loved since I was a kid, spurring lots of conversations with my own mom. Near the end of the month, major diagnoses in my family started to emerge.

This toolmaking was the best solution to a panic moment I had when unpacking screens and realizing I had not made them yet, something I assumed I'd get done during summer. Fortunately, I trusted my students to do the work instead, providing valuable experience that no prior students have gotten (and no future students will, until the tools wear out). For video and magazine features, on top of class visits by researching students and the curious, I also had a photo shoot, two video shoots, and a long interview. The first week of class I was also editing my museum catalog on deadline.

Every year, I'm dumbfounded by how young bodies are changing. This class was the most, hurry and find a chair as soon as Aimee starts talking for more than two sentences during studio time!! It used to be one or two students here and there that required regular sitting, and I often try to hide chairs, or only leave folding chairs in the space that are not that comfortable. They knew exactly where those chairs were and snapped them open any chance they got. I faced another first this year: students wearing gloves while pulling sheets. One did it the entire time, another for a cut, and another for a bandage. While my fingers were cut and splitting because Oberlin water is HARD, I swim every other day, and I am aging, I have never in my papermaking life been able to wear gloves even when I wanted to because I lose too much tactile sense. My guess is that younger people have so much less tactile experience that they don't miss what I miss when my hands are covered. This behavior also reminded me of how infectious certain practices are. The positive spin on this image is that the milkweed coma paper was very beautiful and though the beating was incomplete because we did not have enough fiber to get a proper beat, everyone who helped did a great job.

This was an extra batch of corn husks that my father dutifully saves and dries during the summer season to use as napkins and scrubbies. I found them in December and asked if I could takek them to make paper. I only had half a pound but went to the paper studio after class during bookbinding to cut, soak, cook, and rinse before the temperatures really plummeted. Thanks to Abby for donating an induction burner to the studio! Makes cooking so much easier and faster.

For this batch, I needed help. Amelia, one of my best students from last year, gave me a 7.5-hour day on Saturday. She was there even longer than me, because she arrived before I did for both the morning session and after lunch. She greased the beater, fixed the fan (she is a mechanical whiz) that I had put together in the wrong sequence years ago, helped run the beater for two loads and cleaned it at the end, hand beat a batch of milkweed bast that I had stripped in Michigan and brought expressly to test the new walls that went up too late to test in class, and pulled 1.5 lbs of abaca mixed with corn husk (why did I add too much abaca?! I was so distracted by more students in the room and overestimated what would be appropriate for a day of work). We had a student visit for part of her museum project, and Eliza from this year's class also came to help for a bit before she went back to practicing viola. I brought years of hanji scraps to recycle, but that and the milkweed batch were still less than Amelia's load. Plus, I had her use the heavier brass mould! I tested the school's sugeta for larger sheets as well.

Amelia and I started to really wear out as the afternoon wore on and we were losing sunlight, so I urged Oliver (another top student from last year) to come by after his sports practice. He came in time to do a couple of hours and it was such a relief to get some help. I had them use the new deckle boxes I made this summer to empty the dregs of the vats.

They loaded the drybox while I boarded the other sheets. I didn't want to overwhelm them with two press loads, which would have been the better call (hard press for drybox, less so for walls), so I knew I had to come back the next day after Ed and Kim shoveled the first pass of a full-day snow to check on any paper that fell off the walls.

The walls worked great! Aside from the weird drafts and hot spots I felt that haven't been an issue in the past, likely from the extreme weather that was rolling in. We were working against the clock to finish before the snow arrived. While most of my snow stress at Oberlin was about getting it off my car, I also had to coordinate snow removal back home so that I could get back into my driveway at home. The first time I was able to get a plow guy to push, but the second time his truck was broken. Fortunately my angel teenage neighbor offered to shovel because she said I wouldn't be able to get in otherwise, and then after she cleared the apron (which looks like a mountain of snow), another neighbor angel used her blower to clear the whole rest of my driveway. You know what book I thought about most of this month? Foreman, by Herb Childress.

That is my growing stash of book samples, which I give away to all of my students in a lottery on the last day of class. I always buy a month of a local gym membership so I can swim in a warm pool, and lost my entry card within days of activating it. The front desk person took pity on me and my peri brain, waiving the charge for a new one. I also had a personal training session to begin weight training in earnest, even though it is partly contraindicated for my disabling conditions. I've been in the worst pain of my life because I haven't found a new doctor for injections, and need more physical therapy, but couldn't do it while teaching. Instead of staying home for the big snow day, I went back to campus to check on paper and meet with a student preparing a presentation about my art. Thank goodness for my snow tires because the lots were not plowed.

Right before the storm, my period arrived 2.5 weeks after the last one. I was completely unprepared and stores were closed due to snow. Thankfully, Kim raised daughters, so she found stashes to save me. She and others noted this likely happened from the stress of being so cold at home and needing to move last minute. I also fell one day short of hormones, which I timed for my "day off." When school was cancelled on the final Monday, I treated myself to a soak in their hot tub after my workout, and didn't realize until I got out that my hair had frozen. On the very last day of class, as students were helping me load my car with supplies, my car started to freak out the way it did in the first week. Just in time! It made concerning sounds on the drive home but I got back in one piece, pulled into a newly blown driveway, and unloaded. I called the mechanic the next day and he'll tell me the damage next week—the joys of having a 20-yo vehicle.

I know all of this is nothing in the face of those losing their lives and rights, but from all I've heard, this has been a doozy of a month for everyone. Above: buckets to catch leaks at the library, inevitable for skylights and buildings with flat roofs! My big takeaway: actively recruit an assistant for next year, and plan to do even less.

Another January in Oberlin: Paper, books, snow

Since 2014, I've been teaching this class for Oberlin College's Winter Term. Each Jan, students devote themselves to one project for the entire month, which falls between fall and spring semesters. Three full credits of Winter Term are required to graduate. It means that commencement falls late in May, but I think WT is a rare and perfect time to focus on one thing, and if on campus, experience a quiet and chill environment that is much more subdued than the rest of the school year. Unless you are in my class, which requires industriousness all day every day. Day one: scrape outer layers away from paper mulberry bark.

In the afternoon, fiber processing is more difficult and provides a much smaller yield, but uses native and abundant plants: separating bast fiber from milkweed inner cores. These are dry stems I harvested in Michigan the previous fall.

We had a new project this year, a great way to keep more students occupied because the concurrent task of rinsing cooked fiber cannot really accomodate all eight students in the shower space. We sewed new screens for our modified tools for Asian-style papermaking. This went much faster than me making them myself over the summer.

After rinsing the cooked fiber, students had to clean both the paper mulberry fiber they scraped (from Florida, courtesy of Amy), and the fiber from Thailand.

Then, usually everyone's not favorite step: beating fiber to a pulp. I was surprised with how together this group wanted to be. I've never before seen six students fit onto these tables (usually it's half the amount). I bet the others would have squeezed in if they could have.

Asian-style sheet formation. I had them make more plain sheets this year to get good practice, but may change this next year.

The new hydraulic jack last year shifted around too much in the press, so I took a leaky glove and cut off the fingers to place under the jack to keep it in place.

My dream was for a new laminate wall to be installed in time for boarding, but timing was off by a week. It's okay! The marble shower walls work great for this process. I wish I had monitored students more closely on this step because they had the most wrinkled sheets I've seen; it's so hard to impart the importance of how precise every single step must be.

I didn't give as much time for embedding this year, which I will also change for next year, reverting to pacing from past years for the Asian section.

When we moved into European-style papermaking, I included milkweed coma processing (from pods I harvested in the fall and froze). I had closed and exploded pods, expecting them to get through them all but they refused to touch the open pods and took a long time with the fairly modest number of closed pods. Working pace is different for every group!

They also prepared rags before we loaded the beater.

Early loads included printmaking paper scraps, lots provided by Justin (R) left from his printmaking class and a few more from Mattias (L), who said that the print professor always encourages students to save scraps in case they take papermaking. Wise, given the high-quality cotton content of decent printmaking paper.

This was the first year I had students work solely with cotton (half stuff and rag) to pull with moulds and deckles, deleting abaca because I didn't want to overwhelm them with long beating times since we don't have a dedicated sound-proofed space for the beater. The milkweed coma was finished pretty quickly and made gorgeous sheets as always.

Even with occasional student absences, the drybox filled easily each day. Almost everyone arrived to work all day on our snow day, which was optional.

It's always hard to pull students away from the studio, but in the first week I took them to the museum to see the paper show that I'm in, and in the second week they viewed artists' books in the art library, which also is running a show of my books. This one is always a fave, by Julie Chen.

We always end our wet studio time with paper decoration. Here: suminagashi.

Ed is always extremely generous with prepping and teaching the marbling section, which makes my life so much easier since we have three concurrent techniques going on at once.

Paste papers

We carry everything over from the paper studio that we'll need in the main library special collections classroom, various tools and all of the paper they've made, so that they can make books! I don't know why it took me this long to consider this, but I finally asked if we could move the tables to keep everyone closer to me. Otherwise, those at the end of the tables are too far away to see what I'm doing, even given the document camera. I only wish I figured this out sooner.

The workstation of a chemistry major at the end of the day, impeccable. Makes my heart sing!

Justin, that chem major, was also the first student ever in the history of this class to voluntarily rise his station. I've suggested this, as there is a hand crank for the tables, but no one has taken me up on it, likely because humans are so sedentary now. Lab work doesn't allow for sitting so he is conditioned to a different way of working. To be fair, some students have to share stations, so it's hard to raise the table if you have someone of a different height/seating preference next to you. I'm grateful to my students who shared space without complaint and with a lot of grace.

A second snow day derailed our schedule so we had to move to a different floor to do our regular viewing of books in special collections, but were still able to get a peek before getting back to bookbinding.

On the way back upstairs, we stopped at the letterpress studio so that Ed could give us a tour/history, and see examples of what past classes have printed. Our classes run concurrently and both fulfill the practicum requirement for a Book Studies minor. We definitely have students who do both, which complement each other well.

These are Eliza's books and paper, only a slice of what she produced over the month. She's only the second Conservatory student I've had, and I was worried that she would not be able to do everything she needs as a viola student while in my class. Instead, she impressed me by being fully present daily, practicing after our 6-hour days ended. As one of my history professor colleagues said, she loves Conservatory students because of their intense discipline. I have seven more batches of images of as many pieces from each student! We used to exhibit everything at the end but that stopped a few years back, not by choice. I may push to revive this tradition.

The last task I assign is to make, write, and sign thank you notes to everyone who make this class possible as it's truly a village every year. It's an important good practice, and at least two who received them responded right away, saying, "This made my day!" I was happy to have another wonderful group of students, and to shepherd them through an enormous amount of material during one of our most challenging winters. More images here! Also, Loie, my only senior but the most enthusiastic of the bunch, was kind enough to do a video interview; enjoy her reel here.

December in NYC + ringing in the new year

December was an extremely intense time with major, nearly impossible deadlines. Then, family visits  became unexpectedly much more challenging than usual. This is a rock that my eldest niece painted. She said we could get rid of it once it was documented (if I had had more room in my suitcase, I would have taken it home to put into my garden). I am so grateful to have escaped the flu while staying with sick relatives, caregiving, housekeeping, etc.

Due to all of that, I couldn't see as much art or as many friends as I would have liked, but was so glad to reunite with former hanji students. We were meant to have two more join but they were also felled by viral stuff (a particularly nasty year! I'm glad I got my flu shot earlier in the season). Justine and her family came out during a trip they made from various parts of the US, and we met at the Japan Society to see the Chiharu Shiota show.

Everyone except for her brother here has been part of Hanji Retreat! Justine, Esther, and Christie, in an installation where I immediately in my paper snobbery wondered why the paper was not handmade.

I wanted Esther and Justine (and the other two who had to stay home) to meet so that they were connected before our fall hanji summit. It is a luxury to have younger hanji folks who can figure out good places to lunch afterwards, and everyone was in good spirits given the heavy rain.

In April, I had intended to see the Ruth Asawa retrospective in San Francisco, but my first Covid infection derailed that completely. Then in Dec, I had to delay seeing the NYC iteration because other people were sick. Near the end of my visit, I finally went with family, which meant less close viewing. Not that I begrudged a different experience: it's wonderful to follow a five-year-old discover art without getting bogged down in labels or the viewing flow that the museum has tried to lay out. I watched my niece point and show me what she was drawn to. She especially loved the artwork by children, while I loved Asawa's drawings near the end.

The larger sculptures are amazing, but I loved the tiny ones, the fact that Asawa knew she could only do so many of them for so long. Artmaking has many chapters in a lifetime, and our bodies dictate what we can or cannot do, so it's a gift to capture certain abilities while we still have them.

Back in Ohio, students from various classes (this is a Japanese class taught by Ann Sherif) have been visiting the paper show at Oberlin's art museum. Here is Kevin, the curator of the show (and Asian art curator), speaking to the students.

And in a final museum visit for the year, Sooa, the Korean art curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, provided us with a special activation of the Haegue Yang piece in the Korean gallery. What a treat!