steve kostell: How does paper fit in as a material in your jewelry? kiff slemmons : Paper, ink, and words have been part of my life since childhood. My father ran a small-town newspaper in Iowa and little did I realize then that by watching the linotype machine turn hot metal into type, proofreading newsprint columns with a short pencil, and folding the weekly edition by hand when the folding machine broke down, I was putting down roots for my work as an artist. My formal education was in literature. In some ways, I think I wanted to write and I ended up making jewelry as if it were writing. Ideas excite me first, not technique or process, and often the ideas first occur in the form of language. How did you first encounter Francisco Toledo and Arte Papel? I first met Francisco Toledo in 1994, actually through books. He had started an art library in Oaxaca, at first one big room with beautiful art books that anyone could explore at the long table provided. The next year when we returned to Oaxaca on vacation, we brought 50 pounds of books to donate to the library including some catalogs of exhibitions that my husband curated. summer 2015 - 17 Soon after Toledo invited my husband Rod to do an exhibition of Lee Friedlander's work in the Contemporary Museum in Oaxaca. The exhibition took place in 1995. We returned to Oaxaca, brought more books, and became more involved with the arts community in Oaxaca. In 2001 Toledo invited me to work in a paper studio he had established a few years earlier in a refurbished nineteenthcentury hydroelectric plant in Vista Hermosa, a mountain village outside Oaxaca. I was not sure what I might have to offer in the way of designing jewelry for the artisans working there since I worked primarily with metal and by my own hand. However, I loved the paper itself, that it was made by hand from indigenous renewable materials, and that its production provided a means of income for various layers of the community. My decision to work there also came out of enormous respect for Francisco Toledo, as a great artist and as a cultural activist of a depth not often acknowledged in regard to a single individual. How did you first introduce paper into your jewelry? The first piece that I made at Arte Papel was a necklace of paper discs, stamped out one by one with a punch. This necklace was modeled after African necklaces of vinyl discs or sequins that I have worn and collected for many years. The paper version was beautiful but took a long time to make and seemed unreasonable for reproducing, the first evidence of how far I was from ideas of design in a production context, since I worked alone and most often on one-of-a-kind pieces. Anyway, we started with simple elements, simple designs. I made the prototype. By the end of the first working period we had made 15 to 20 pieces that could be reproduced. We ended up having a small exhibition at the Institute of Graphic Arts in Oaxaca, alerting the community to the activity of the workshop. Did you have a sense at the time that you would still be collaborating with them to this day? We had no formal plan to continue. I gave those first designs to the workshop to reproduce and sell. It turned out, however, that I continued to have new ideas for them, and returned the next year, and the next, for now over 12 years. My role was primarily as a teacher of design and structure though as with most teaching, I was getting another education of my own from working cross culturally. The project has evolved with complicated and nuanced layers of collaboration. Working together has contradicted assumptions of culture, of authenticity and synthesis and can invigorate crosspollination. A very important part of the whole project was developing trust and respect and that takes time. I have given most all of my designs to the workshop and have encouraged development of designs coming from them. They could choose what they wanted to reproduce and we did not always agree on colors and forms we liked best. However, I always stressed the need for quality control. And it was important to go over all of these issues together, again to encourage ownership on all sides. Can you speak about your design process at Arte Papel? I began first to work with the papermakers developing different papers for use in jewelry, experimenting with texture, thickness and weight, color, and the possibilities for forms in sync with the particular types of paper. Working with the pulp directly did not serve in the beginning but recently, combined with clay, the pulp has been working well for making the bowls that I used to hold some of the jewelry pieces in my recent exhibition in New York. The papermakers also taught me about the various fibers used, all from plants growing in the region of Oaxaca such as majahua, chichicastle, agave, and pochote. A native cotton, coyuche, was also used as well as an industrial cotton, bundles of which were left over from a nearby abandoned textile mill. Toledo has also encouraged the local growing of papermaking materials which are harvested and processed regularly. It seems as if Francisco Toledo has been at the core of this very successful project. How has the community been transformed by Arte Papel? When Francisco Toledo first started working in the San Agustin area there were no paper manufacturers at all. He recruited a group of very young people to learn the process from the visiting advisor and technician from Finland and how to use the machinery that was donated and purchased. The town was in need of employment possibilities and still suffering from the closing of a very large textile mill. The paper workshop was established in an old hydroelectric plant that had serviced the mill. Thanks also to Toledo, the mill factory is now an amazing complete art school attracting an international student and teacher population. Now several former workers at Arte Papel have their own paper production shops, and there is a growing population of artists working in all media who have moved to this culturally rich area. In your writings and in the lecture I heard you give, you note three threads that run through all of your work—scale, the language of material, and the idea of "more than one to make one." Can you relate these elements of your approach to your work in paper made both collaboratively and individually? After several years of working in Oaxaca in the role of teacher and designer, I started to think as an artist about what we have to say about paper, its capacity for simplicity and elaboration, for structure and design, and for countering the assumptions about durability and the ephemeral. Through paper the value of material and idea in jewelry were expanded by exploring the possibilities of improvisation and collaboration. Throughout the time with the artisans in the workshop we discussed how jewelry might be considered art and how jewelry made of paper might be presented in an art context. We explored these questions in an exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center using an approach that I have taken for many years where individual pieces are parts of a larger idea rather than complete on their own. An installation allows the individual parts to come together to make something beyond their singular identities. For the show, we made two large bodies of work, one in color, and one in white to be shown in separate large galleries. In the gallery of white pieces, paper sheets with the patterns drawn before cutting were shown on the wall, providing a two-dimensional sense to the jewelry before it was turned into three dimensional form. All the pieces were made from a few basic elements, a few basic techniques that combined to provide a layered visual language useful for moving from product to poetry. The possibilities summer 2015 - 19 of paper for structure and form were most clearly shown when exhibited on the wall but also on the body where one piece could have many different configurations. The surface variations, the color, and texture of the paper were pronounced when many were shown together. The scale of the jewelry was also torqued by this kind of presentation, both individually where a necklace of paper would weigh much less than its representation in metal. En masse on the wall, many pieces could work as drawings or suggest architecture first rather than jewelry. People assume paper is fragile. In fact, it can be strong. People assume jewelry is made of metal and precious material; paper is not that. But paper has metaphoric possibilities in other ways as a carrier of ideas, as evidence of culture. Paper was significant in pre-conquest culture in Mexico. As were books. Books were signs of a more advanced culture and their presence thoroughly impressed and later threatened the first conquistadors from Spain. The complex rich culture developing in Mexico concurrent with that in Europe was previously unknown and in many ways the artistic heritage of Mexico is still not fully acknowledged today. Working with Arte Papel has given me an ongoing opportunity to connect deeply with the culture as well as celebrate it and give it something in return. There is an individual piece, a necklace, made originally for the exhibition in Chicago that represents the spirit of our collaboration and provides a means of reconnecting. The name of the necklace is Milagros or "miracles" in translation. Milagros are used as ex votos in Mexico and the young women at Arte Papel know all about them. One day I suggested that we make a necklace that literally included all of us, and that also illustrated the possibilities for conceptual depth in the paper jewelry. We talked about milagros, how they are used as requests and wishes or as gratitude or thanks for requests fulfilled, and how the necklace could be made as a kind of offering of what our project was all about. I asked that we each write on five cutout triangular pieces our wishes and another five pieces with a thank-you on each one. This they all took very seriously and we wrote in silence (unusual for most of the working time) and concentration for nearly an hour. Then the papers were rolled into the beads we have used for many of the jewelry designs. I was responsible for stringing the beads in the form of the necklace. Milagros are often also worn for good luck and protection. We hope to protect the livelihood of Arte Papel. During the most recent time working in Oaxaca earlier this year, we repeated the process and made two more necklaces. This proved to be good way to reconnect, to work together again even within a short time. You have produced a wonderful set of books Kiff Slemmons and Arte Papel Oaxaca that document your experience there. You graciously close each of the books with the phrase, "Esteem the Giver." Could you expand on your thoughts relating to your use of this phrase and the importance that it holds? I use this phrase at the end of three books about my work made possible through the generosity of many individuals who contributed time and skills and financial support. It is a way to further acknowledge and honor their generosity and the generosity of artists who give through their work. I value books not only for what they give but for their physical presence. They provide the means to communicate further the work by acting as alternative exhibitions for a wider audience. The Arte Papel books served in this way, extending the exhibition celebrating handmade paper, its value as a material in jewelry and its place in cultural development, both as a respected means of making a living and as a platform for transmitting ideas. "Esteem the Giver" was a phrase written on miniature tokens of friendship like porcelain boxes or cups in the nineteenth century. I like the poetic resonance of this simple phrase. It is the spirit of respect and generosity that opens possibilities and minds to art.
