Some individuals are quite capable of enjoying and utilizing whatever is at hand, wherever they are. Knowles possesses a certain open state of mind that allows for simplicity and a quiet, spontaneous creativity. She uses found objects, paper, sound, and poetry to present an environment for our immediate investigation. She teaches us how to listen, not so much to her opinion but to the present moment. Knowles is curious about how things are described. She makes lists of things that are related and then injects a directive telling the viewer what to do. She might lay a collection of old shoe parts on a table with no directive at all, simply putting them there for our perusal. She will group objects together, suggesting an unusual significance, seldom imposing one. Knowles’s poetic performance installations derive from a selection of incidental impressions, meanings, and directions that she integrates into collage and assemblage. Her paperworks are printed or embedded with ordinary objects, such as gloves or old kitchen utensils, a paper clip, a razor blade. Some of her paperworks are used as sound instruments during performance. Her words are used as much for the value of how they sound as for their meaning or meter. She also uses silence.  Knowles does not elevate an object much further than its normal utility. She shows us a history of the ordinary and everyday. And she never changes an object so much that it loses its initial identity. The old shoe is evocative enough for having been where it was when she found it, and is now also sufficient in its new context. This humble attitude keeps her work fresh with wonder even while she is using elements that would normally be thrown in the garbage dump or would have rusted to the point of frozen disuse. Knowles graduated with an honors degree in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 1956. She also studied at Middlebury College and at the Manhattan School of Printing. She became fascinated with the use of silkscreen and photo transfer methods, and still employs cyanotype and other photo processes on cloth and paper. Many of her early photoworks were exhibited at the Judson Gallery in 1960. In the late 1950s Knowles became a homesteader in the New York City neighborhood called Soho, settling there long before residential lofts and commercial galleries were common. She began to participate in the development of a broadening aesthetic that incorporated all the senses, revolutionizing the exhibition of conceptual work outside the confines of the museum, and bringing performance into the streets. She is one of the founding members of Fluxus, which initiated in 1962 in Wiesbaden, Germany. This group became involved in publishing its work through small press venues. The artists' network often communicated through the mail, establishing a system of exchange and collaboration throughout America and Europe, and eventually into Japan and Korea. Some of Knowles’s best known accomplishments of the 1960s are her collaborations with John Cage in designing Notations and with Marcel Duchamp in producing the print Coeurs Volants for Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press. In 1967 her installation of The Big Book was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair and traveled throughout Europe. It was last exhibited at the University of California - San Diego, where, according to the artist's curriculum vitae, "it collapsed.” The Big Book was an eight-foot tall environmental book object installation. It consisted of seven panel pages that moved on casters around a central pole. Constructed as an abode for the body and spirit, the book invited the viewer to enter and engage in a truncated version of apartment life in New York City. It included a library, a gallery, a working kitchen, a chemical toilet, and a sleeping space inside a grass tunnel. The cover of the book had a porthole through which one could crawl to begin the journey. A ladder between two pages allowed an overview of the world outside the book. From 1970 to 1973 Knowles supervised the print and performance lab at California Institute of the Arts, where she worked with Nam June Paik, Simone Forti, and Allan Kaprow, among others. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship to produce “The House of Dust,” which she describes as “a computer–generated, randomly structured poem with endless variations.”1 Her work with sound led her to Europe and Japan, to produce radio plays for West German Radio. While in Japan in 1975, she stayed in a paper factory where robes for Kabuki theater were fabricated. She had been invited by Kyoko Ibe, an artist and the owner of the factory, whom she had met in Aalburg, Denmark. She credits this experience in Japan as having inspired her interest in using paper for its sound qualities in performance. She describes the environment: “The women would work for hours wrinkling and crinkling the paper, creating a steady whooshing sound which I could hear from my room. These women didn’t know that they were making my kind of music. I began dreaming of instruments in paper." Knowles made her first paper instruments in 1982. After a visit to her studio in Barrytown (New York), Helmut Becker, Coco Gordon, and Knowles were driving back to New York City when Becker suggested that Knowles make a paper bodhran, a type of Celtic drum. Gordon later made the pulp and cast the instrument for her, using a Japanese chime as a form. This led to further collaboration at Gordon's studio, Watermark Press. Loose Pages is a performance book fabricated by Gordon and Knowles in 1983, in an edition of ten. Knowles performs this work by dressing a live female figure from head to toe, hat to slippers, in various paper pages. Meticulously cast in several tones of overbeaten flax, the pages are loosely shaped to fit the body. The sounds of the sheets as they were being put on the figure became the performance. Knowles recounts: “I performed this piece for more than a decade, as my main offering. Reading fragments of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which were penciled onto the pages, the living sculpture was steadily built as each sheet was added to the form.” Gordon has worked with Knowles throughout the years, including making paper for her exhibition at the Emily Harvey Gallery in 2000, called "Footnotes." Knowles presented this work in conjunction with the publication of a book of the same name. In this exhibition she asked many of the individuals with whom she had previously collaborated to help her execute paperworks. Knowles and I have shared a papermaking studio in Barrytown for more than ten years, during which time I have assisted her in forming paperworks for many of her installations. To work together, I had to loosen up my attitudes about the use of handmade paper. Knowles uses handmade paper for the range of sounds that can be evoked, and for its lightweight portability. She likes that the work can be folded or rolled up to carry with her in her travels. I have been trained to think in archival terms. For her, the object serves the performance, so I could not be too precious about where the object might end up. At first it was odd to see her place Gordon's beautiful flax sheets on the floor. Knowles appreciates the worn handmade sheet as much as a brand new object with no history. I spoke about this issue with Mina Takahashi when Knowles began a residency at Dieu Donné Papermill in 2001. Takahashi stressed that Knowles is, in essence, a poet: “As any good poem or work of art shifts in meaning but remains powerful, so do her paper instruments. They resonate with increasing softness as they are handled more and more.” Knowles has had a relationship with Amanda Degener ever since they met at a Fluxus exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1993. When Knowles visited Degener's studio, she was enchanted by her three-dimensional Brick Book, which Degener had embedded with a statement by Black Elk about the earth. Degener was interested in performing Knowles's work, so they set aside time to work together at Cave Paper. Degener made a red dress and props for Knowles's concert at The International Paper Conference in Japan in 1996 and assisted in the performance there. Two years later, Degener arranged for Knowles to perform at the Minnesota College of Art and Design, which also allowed her to work at Cave Paper on a series of brick books. Degener also designed large scale “bean turners,” using two sheets loosely couched together with beans inside. When the piece is held up and turned, the beans fall down inside the crisp pocket between the sheets, creating a sound like breaking waves. When asked for her impressions of working with Knowles, Degener told me, “She moves through the universe with a gentle flow. She wanders around and finds things; those things end up in her artwork. She doesn’t just reach out and take them, instead she hears them calling.” The two have also performed together in Iowa City and Chicago. Degener describes another collaboration: “We performed 'Onion Skin Song' in Taiwan at the Su Ho Memorial Paper Museum. We rolled out approximately twelve feet of Saran Wrap and walked along it sprinkling onion skins. Then we rolled out another piece of wrap on top of it. Two helpers held it up horizontally and I used rocks and a drumstick to play the onion skins as a musical score, while Alison shook the beans in her paper bodhran. It is the only work of art that I have seen or been in that makes an action into an image, then back into an action.” In 2001, Knowles began to work with Paul Wong during a collaboration between the Drawing Center and Dieu Donné Papermill, called “Performance Drawings.” Five performance artists were selected to “explore the intersection of drawing and performance.”2 Dieu Donné produced paperworks with two of the five artists featured in the project, Knowles and Elena del Rivero. At the beginning of the project, Wong helped her to curate and repair some of her instruments and works that were made by others over the years; this established a working relationship. They then created new instruments based on Knowles's specifications and ideas, with strong input from Wong. He comments, “Her work absorbs the accidental and natural occurrences inherent in using high shrinkage papermaking fibers, allowing the air drying to shape the pieces. Her response to the resulting forms lends to how the work operates as an object with soundmaking potential.” For a concert titled “Paper Weather,” Wong produced an exquisite Brown Bean Drum, with a disk almost twenty inches in diameter and one inch hollow for the beans inside. He invented new handmade paper forms called “bean shakers,” small hand-held packets and bags that held various types of beans. He also made two large bean turners and a flax chime. Knowles and Wong also worked together at the mill to produce the Bean Snow series for an exhibition shown at Dieu Donné concurrent with her performance. The Bean Snow edition of thirty prints was made using stenciled cotton pulp on translucent abaca base sheets (each approximately 18” x 15”). Placing beans and various found objects onto no-see-um netting, the artist composed her imagery for the cotton pulp layer. Using a “blowout” technique developed at the mill by Pat Almonrode, they sprayed water to remove the pulp from the edges of the objects, leaving a positive of each object’s shape. This layer was then couched onto the base sheet. The sheets were force-air dried and further worked with silkscreen, graphite, and hand stamps. The paper was printed front and back with a written description of the process involved in making the work. The word "work" does not convey a true sense of Alison Knowles's efforts. The line between how she works and how she lives and plays becomes irrelevant. When I started working on this article, my husband, Ken Ytuarte, recalled a late-March afternoon at the Barrytown studio. Knowles suggested that they go for a walk together down to the Hudson River, to listen. Following a path he knew, they went to the river's edge. There they stood for quite some time, their attention on the percussive cracking of the river ice, as springtime emerged.  Notes 1. James Tenney created the computer printout for this work.2. From Drawing Papers 20, catalogue of an exhibition at the Drawing Center, April 19-July 28, 2001.