Catherine Nash: Did you choose Poland or did the Fulbright program just place you there? Karen Stahlecker: You must choose and dedicate your application to a specific place with a specific project in mind. CN: How did your decision to choose Poland come about? Was it through people you had met?  KS: Yes. I had visited Poland a couple of years before. There was a very profound interest in papermaking in Poland but, due to all the decades of being shut up behind the Iron Curtain, very little if any information had gotten through. So there was interest but extremely poor and limited studio practice. Basically they were recycling grey toilet paper as a source of paper pulp. As I looked around the country, I saw a place absolutely wealthy in textiles and agriculture. At first I couldn't understand why papermaking wasn't more advanced but I realized that they just didn't know what incredible resources they had at their fingertips. They needed someone who could show them that they were capable of making pretty good paper with simple equipment, utilizing raw materials that were already at hand. So, that is what I proposed to do, with both teaching and research approaches.  CN: Did you make contacts at the time of your first visit?  KS: Yes, with two professors from the Art Academy in Lodz and then the project was two years in the making, a lot of it spent on preparation, as well as the application process. I'd been accepted to do a full school year, which would have been nine months. Due to personal situations, I ended up cutting back my stay to six months. Visits to other academies were arranged through word of mouth.  INTER 1999  Sylwia Wozniak and Izabella Wyrwa, two oj the long-term paper students at the Akademia Sztuk Pieknych, from the fibers program, working with beginning Oriental paper. Photograph (and all others not otherwise marked) by Karen Stahlecker.    eN: You'd traveled through various Eastern European countries before. Had you seen contemporary art works that inspired you to choose Poland?  KS: Yes, some absolutely elegant works done with simple, basic materials, because that is all they had to work with. With the correct aesthetic you can turn garbage into something beautiful. Isn't that at the basis of some of our papermaking? You take the dregs and the dross and you turn them into something wonderful. So, those were parts of the proposal and the thinking and the inspiration that drew me. On a more general level, I have ancestral ties to Eastern Europe. This had intrigued me for many years because I had heard stories about this region since I was a little kid. Not Poland per se, but Slovakia, which is a little south of there. I had made visits and done projects in the Czech Republic and in Budapest, in Hungary. I had also visited Poland and Slovakia. I did a major tour through there just for my edification and inspiration some years back, so I was intrigued. I was also relatively comfortable with the East in the sense that I wouldn't just be turning up and starting to work. I had some sense of what kinds of situations and problems I'd be dealing with. I had learned a lot in that respect. Never having worked within the Eastern European academia until I had arrived was a bit of an eye opener, though. They run their art academies very differently than we run our art schools and that took some getting used to.  eN: When you arrived in Poland you were based in Lodz, and then you commuted to other communities.  KS: I traveled to other communities and did other programming. It varied a lot. Sometimes I lectured sometimes I stayed in residence for a little bit. It was case by case, depending on what the institution could manage. But, I made a point, at the very least, to v' it and lecture at perhaps four or five other academies while I was based in Lodz. I got out of town for som other projects as well.  eN: Did you find language a problem?  KS: Oh yes, but a lot of people speak English there. younger people, and it always worked out. I had an interpreter at the Academy for my public lecture . I collaborated quite a bit with professor Pawel Wandel from the paper science program at the Poly technical Institute and he had actually spent some years teaching in Canada.  eN: Starting up a program from scratch is challen ing, especially if you are in a country that has a lack of funds and resources, and a lack of equipment. Were you doing mostly handbeating?  KS: Exactly. And using blenders and gentl, processed plant material. Plus we had located a source of very high quality archival filter pape which, when recycled to blend with plants, was gi\" ing us good pH values. It was very short fiber, but we used it to stretch plant material into something more usable as paper. Also, I had received a wonderful   donation of pulps and fibers, basically a semester's worth of Eastern fibers, which really helped a lot. Because I had a very small budget for materials and gear, I gathered everything I could get donated before I left. I then used the remaining money to buy things in Poland on site, to actually build the studio itself. We were starting totally from scratch.  CN: Did you discover any local fibers that you hadn't used before? Were there ones that you recognized?  KS: I found all the ones I knew from the Midwest but I had to start learning the Polish names for them, which was lots of fun. Working with plants there was pretty straight forward. Their climate was not so far off from the area around Chicago where I had done a lot of earlier work. So I was really very comfortable, although we had to start in the dead of winter, which was a bit tricky. For example, when I met with my students in Wroclaw in the Spring, I took them all to a botanical garden. We identified plants that they might find in the wild that might be usable for making paper.  CN: Poland is so well known for fiber arts, tapestry, and weaving. Did you find a different type of student in your papermaking classes? Who was drawn to take your courses?  KS: Basically, yes, Poland is known for those things now. I was based at an Arts Academy with a huge fiber department, for which it is most well known. They have several other departments, from Printmaking to Painting to Arts Education. I drew students from all over, much as I do in the States. I am teaching a medium and I can help a student direct it to whatever ends she or he needs to take. So in Poland, yes, some of my students were very practically oriented towards textiles, concentrating, for example, in fabric design, carpet design, Jacquard weaving, etc. Others were much freer than that and were looking for food for their painting or their printmaking. Or they were just looking for English lessons. Half of my students also practiced their English with me. It was an interesting mix.  CN: When you were there did you just teach straight papermaking or did you also teach artist books? What other courses did you offer?  WINTER 1999  Zbyradowska displays the vast quantity of cattail pulp she is procesing and hand-beating for her work.   Zbyradowska casting hand-beaten cattail pulp to form a large, heavy sheet for one ofher  constructions.  Zbyradowska's large, cast sheet, fully formed and beginning to dry.  11     Museum of Paper, Dushniki, in the countryside outside Wroclaw.  Overview of a papermaking workshop in progress.  KS: We focused pretty much on technical and artistic angles of hand papermakin It went back and forth among different students. My own research had to do with what qualities and sorts of papers I could get with completely local raw material. developed a pretty nice, large sample book of locally generated papers for variom uses. An exact copy of it is now in the library in Lodz because we developed it together. I gave them some other material that I had duplicates of, other fiber that I had worked with, like iris. I figured once they knew what they were doing, they could look further for different local plant materials.  CN: How long did you work with the students?  KS: I had a core group of about twelve or fourteen students that started with me and made it all the way through the Spring semester. I had other students come and go, basically for focused weekend workshops. I offered papermaking for the printmaking department and I did papermaking for a group that came in from Wrocla . who were affiliated mostly with the painting department. They also did printmakin and sponsored my return visit to the art academy. All of them treated me well. They took me all over Wroclaw, a beautiful city sometimes called the Venice of Poland. It' all built on rivers. There is a wonderful, newly renovated old paper mill near there called Dushniki. The mill dates, I believe, back to the 1600s. It is now evolving into a wonderful museum and is still a working paper mill. It is the only historical mill left in Poland.  CN: Is it still in operation as a hand papermill?  KS: In a sense. They are trying. The structure is so old they actually cannot run a Hollander in it anymore so they bring in pulp from a commercial mill and rna sheets by hand; To me this is not really hand papermaking per se but they are doin what they can to survive. Apparently Poland once had a hand paper craft on a par with France and Germany but so much was destroyed during the wars that they are only just now rediscovering their heritage.  eN: I would imagine the final projects were somewhat different, once these students had learned the technical aspects of papermaking and were free to play arti Ii- HAXD PAPER\1AKI!"C   cally. Did you notice any difference from American programs?  KS: Kind of. There is a different aesthetic there, in my opinion. This is a pretty generalized view, but there is a prevalent aesthetic there of material minimalism. It is really pretty elegant. Within fiber programs and craft orientations, less is more.  eN: Almost Japanese in its simplicity?  KS: Yes, an elegant simplicity with a minimum of distractions. It is very hard to explain it exactly. If I showed you some catalogs I think I could point out this way of thinking. They tend, in many cases but certainly not across the board, toward very natural, restrained color use, for example.  eN: This goes back to something you said about your initial inspiration to go to Poland. Nature as source and resource.  KS: Which in a nutshell, I think, even describes my personal work as a papermaker and an artist. Through paper I have increased my dialogue with the natural world. I have used it not only for resources and materials, but for sources, including symbolism, allegory, and other references. What I sensed in a lot of the work (not paper work but textile-based work I was seeing coming from Poland in the mid-1980s), when I began to be exposed to it firsthand, was a concurrent aesthetic that was extremely tied to the natural world.  eN: And that attracted you to working there?  Installation view of artists' books at Galeria Baluska, Lodz, April 1997.  KS: Part of what piqued my interest in Poland early on, which led me to take a closer look, is that I was in fact seeing very few artists, outside of straight textile, in international paper shows. For example, in all the Paper Biennials in Duren there were very few, if any, Eastern Europeans. I thought this was very strange. Here they are, practically world leaders within traditional and contemporary textile fiber and then zippo in paper. How was this possible? What was wrong? My visit to Lodz in 1994 made me realize that they just didn't have technical support and information. I thought I could help them with that. I was drawn to a certain aesthetic and senSibility that I saw in other media there. This all came together as a proposal with a concept for using nature for the basis of the work.  eN: What were your personal goals while there?  KS: I didn't expect to make any research gains. I expected to find inspiration and people who would probably fuel my work and my thinking, but that was a by-product. My goal was to help get at least one facility going in Poland where papermaking was happening within an art academy as opposed to a polytechnical institute. Professor Wandelt was an incredible contact vis-a-vis chemistry. The only Hollander in Lodz was in his lab at the Poly technical Institute.  eN: Do you feel you accomplished your goals?  KS: Believe me, it was really touch-and-go there for a while. We tried to focus on what we could in one  WINTER 1999  13     The "hard core" papermaking crew in the paper studio at the Academy in Lodz: Associate Professor Ewa Latkowska and Karen Stahlecker,front and center, with students !from left) Malgorzata Zbyradowska, Anna Krupska, Andrzej Hoffman, Izabella Wyrwa, Kamil Kuskowski, and Sylwia  Wozniak. Photographer unknown.  semester. The true long-term plan would be the transmission of information together with the donations and the investment I used from the grant, to get a primitive but workable facility going. The idea was that it would carryon. For a while it was reall. doubtful that there would be faculty to do that. Eventually one professor, E\ a Latkowska, who had been my assistant decided that, yes, it did interest her, veIJ much. We got funding for her and one of my very best graduate students in Poland Silwia Wozniak, to join me in the States a few months after I returned. We put in n 0 concentrated weeks in my papermaking studio in Washington state. This was to prepare them for teaching and to give them more advanced techniques. I gave them the support to develop some wonderful work that is being shown in Poland as we spe They started work on artist books.  CN: Is the Academy in Lodz continuing courses in papermaking right now?  KS: Yes. I hear that there is a papermaking program in place and it is growin beyond my wildest dreams! I still do what I can to support them. I send them occasional chemistry, they particularly need formation aid. They had not figured ou where to get that, but we did figure out where to get sizing, fiber, caustic, etc. Neri one thing they were dependent on the States for, although now they have found a German source they can buy it from.  CN: How did the Polish experience affect your work? Where are you going from here?  KS: Well, after all those years living in Alaska and then being a gypsy, I had gotten out of touch with the direct harvest of plants; it really just wasn't an option. I g.re some things in California but I wasn't connected with harvesting plants as I had beer earlier so I dove in head first in Poland. I considered the plants there a valuable loca;. resource that we had to exploit. It got me excited about harvesting and growin plants again. I brought a lot of that joy of working with plants here to Tucson. You saw the student samples here; about 50% of them are directly processed from plan am looking ahead to plumbing the Midwest again, now that I have moved back there possibly even growing some crops directly for papermaking this summer. We'll how that goes.  CN: Well, I think that's a great direction, especially with your new life, on thirt} acres on an old farm in Iowa. That's wonderful!  HA,\DPAPER\

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