BE: Were the works you were doing in felt similar in style to what you are doing in paper now? EMK: Yes. Almost identical. I developed a style where I assembled individual units of handmade felt that were about three to four inches wide and many different lengths and then I attached them to a canvas backing. With felt I had modular units, but they were laid on their sides. You can't make felt stand up straight. I eventually made the felts double-sided so that there was one color on one side and another color on the other. With felt the fibers migrate. If you put black wool on the back of white wool, the fibers will migrate through each other, creating undertones. With my paper the fibers stay where I put them and I rely on the deckle to give that fuzzy edge intermingling. That's why I love the deckle so much. And that is why I make the paper in strips, to get as much deckle edge as possible per square inch.  I made a felt piece in 1985 and then a paper piece two years later. The second piece has almost the same image as the first, but reversed. BE: The pieces are very geometric. EMK: I think that suits the medium because the deckle itself produces such a ruffled, textured edge that you need a simple shape to make the work dynamic. If the image is too organic or too complicated it becomes only texture and you lose yourself in prettiness. The color changes in my recent paper pieces, depending on the viewpoint. In one, a section of the piece will look coral from one angle but from the other side that same section is green. In another work one sees blue changing to lavender when viewed from the left; the same area viewed from the right is orange and red. I've made other paper pieces that were meant to be seen straight on. They didn't have a left and right side.  BE: Are they from the same period? EMK: No, those are older. In 1998, I was making two-sided paper and folding it. I started with the left and the rights in 1999. When I first started making double-sided papers and folding them, the backside was a solid color and the inside a solid color. The piece was pretty much a one-position piece. Then I discovered that I could make three dips into two different vats so that each piece of paper had a left and a right side on the back and a left and a right side on the front. When I folded it, I got different colors showing from each direction. I could make the piece change with movement.  When I was a child, my mother took me to the Chicago Art Institute and I saw my first piece by Yakov Agam. Agam was working with constructed wood. He painted on the left, the right, and the front of each piece of wood so the image changed as you walked by. In my pieces the deckle edge produces a texture, so the effect is more organic, more diffuse.  BE: So, previous to that you had just one color on each side; you weren't doing half colors on each side. Do I have it right? EMK: Right. I wasn't trying to get a different design from one side to the other side.  BE: This development, this transition in your technique over time toward different designs on each side seems significant.  EMK: Yes. Lee Scott McDonald made me a full-width mould and then both halves, which I am able to register. I have used these moulds now for five years. BE: Did you come up with this mould design? EMK: Yes. The first time I did it, I made 1-by-2 chicken wire moulds with Foam Core inserts. They would fall apart, so finally I said, "Lee, make me one." So now I make long strips of paper which I can then tear to create the shorter strips. I hang them over string and that allows them to buckle and cockle. I actually fold them while they are wet so that they dry with the fold in them. BE: So, you have strip of paper that is pink on the left half and green on the right. Then, when it is flipped over the pink is again on the left side and the green on the right. The pink and the green back each other.  EMK: Yes, after it is folded, all the greens are on one side and the pinks are all on the other side. The papermaking process is a direct color run, meaning that as I make the paper I'm adding a cup of new pigmented pulp each time I make a piece of paper. So if I start with pink and I'm slowly adding yellow, that's going to gradually turn into gold and orange. By the time I reach orange, I'm going to start adding lime-green to turn it green. BE: So, you start by making a sheet of paper, then add some pigment to the vat, and then make the next sheet. EMK: I'm adding pigmented pulp to the vat. I might mix twenty buckets of pulp and I pigment them so I have twenty colors at my disposal. I'll start with one color and then I slowly add other colors. After each dip of a new piece of paper I add another color to the vat and that causes the whole color to shift. No two pieces of paper are the same. I can also change the tone by adding black and white, to darken and lighten. If I have a light color, I have to be careful that I don't add a lot of a new, dark color too soon or else I'll get too rapid of a color change. BE: How do you assemble these works? EMK: They're all attached to a canvas backing with little tiny plastic pop rivets and they button through a twill tape strip because the paper needs to have some extra protection. If you just simply puncture the paper with a needle, the paper has a tendency to tear so I put the twill tape down and then push through that. I use pre-stretched canvas with the twill tape already attached to it. I tuck the sheets under the tape, then use the attacher through the canvas and the twill tape. BE: What fibers do you like to work with best? EMK: Abaca and cotton: the cotton because it takes the color reasonably well and it's less expensive. I usually overbeat my cotton. I add the abaca for strength and lustre. It also gives a really nice deckle edge. BE: Have you experimented with other fibers much? EMK: I did a lot of work with linen. It's very nice, but I don't want to spend my whole life beating. This year, my daughter and I made papyrus paper, but not traditional papyrus sheets. We grew papyrus, chopped it up, cooked it, ran it through the beater, and dipped it, and she did a science fair project with it.  BE: How did that work out? EMK: It was very interesting. After testing different types of paper, my daughter discovered that your basic dollar bill has the strongest fibers of all. But papyrus does make a very interesting paper, using the traditional Western method. It reminds me a little bit of abaca or linen, but it doesn't have the strength.   BE: I want to ask about the difference between your collages and your dimensional-color works. Is one the fun and one the work? EMK: That's an interesting question. Everybody has a public and private persona, and the dimensional paper pieces followed on the heels of the fiber work. The dimensional paper pieces are really very quiet sculptures. They stand out in space. The collages are my private moments and they stand as records in time. I use materials I have at hand. Sometimes they are old etchings. Sometimes they're experiments from working with elementary school kids. Sometimes they're fabrics that resonate with memory, like my father's old ties. So they become intensely personal. I made them as a series for a show in April this year. However, I began working on them when my daughters—almost teenagers now—were babies and I couldn't really do anything large scale or long-term. I simply worked small and never finished anything. This year my studio flooded. In the process of moving everything, I shifted a box and all of these unfinished collages fell out. So I finished them and put them in the show. BE: You've titled one piece Knossos and two have "Ariadne" in their titles. Is there some connection to Greek history? EMK: Yes. My father was a teacher of English literature and he studied the classics. So, I had known and appreciated Greek mythology for a long time. This piece is called Attica. You know the story of Theseus, who went to slay the Minotaur. He told his father that if he was victorious and was returning safely, he would change the sails. Perhaps because of bad karma for leaving Ariadne behind on the island, after he had told her he was going to marry her and take her away from her father's palace, he forgets to change the sails and he returns with black sails on his ship. In despair, Theseus's father throws himself off a cliff. BE: What were you feeling when you made the piece that linked to the story of the black sail and Theseus's father? EMK: My own father died just a year and a half ago. There is much about grief in that particular piece. It's a very powerful piece for me.  BE: I'm curious to know why your more public pieces are very geometric as opposed to representational, figurative. EMK: When I was in school in the seventies, it was the height of conceptual and minimal work. For a lot of students, Don Judd was the cool artist. Richard Serra. Eva Hess is very influential for a lot of people in the fiber movement. She was taking material, working it almost in an expressionistic way with a sense of hand, but very forward, very out there, because she was doing minimal images. So it was a marriage of something that had come before, expressionism, and minimalism. She was a pivotal figure for me, because she took the old and she went forward with it and she wasn't getting stuck in the I'm-going-to-make-a-big-black-cube school of minimalism. I look at my dimensional paper work as coming out of a minimalist tradition in the sense that the images need to be simple. It comes out of a geometric or abstract tradition and yet it is also part-and-parcel of that enjoyment of texture that was also formed by the fiber movement. The fiber movement of the sixties and the seventies was about material, wonderful material, material all over the place. Lots of it. Why does anybody do anything that is abstract versus representational? You like what you see. There is an Asian concept of simplicity that allows for greater experience. Zen gardens, obviously, are masterpieces of the simple, using a minimal number of elements to create the maximum amount of impact. My older work was, perhaps, more grounded in the textile tradition. For example, a piece like Pinwheels is about textile patterns, but blown up to a larger, three-dimensional scale. In my more recent pieces I have tried to get back to that idea of simplicity. On the other hand, I have the contradiction of living in a Western culture and being a Westerner, so I'm also going toward decoration. I also put stuff in. It's kind of like working in your garden. You take stuff out, you put stuff in. BE: You have also, I understand, started designing gardens. And I know that you are very involved in tai chi. Do these three different interests—your artwork, the gardens, and the tai chi—connect? EMK: I would like to say yes. They link in the sense that I am always looking for balance. In tai chi, there is movement and there is stillness. In gardens and in art, there is fullness and there is emptiness. So, at any one time, if I am trying to figure out where I have to place a tree or where I have to put a particular shrub, or if I am looking at a piece of red fabric and a piece of green paper, I am thinking about opposition, composition, balance, yin-yang, push-pull. I am also trying to always balance what I call the forwardness and the quietness of any particular space or, if it is in a garden design, how much is going to be bright and attention getting, and how much is going to be soft and receding and quieting.  BE: What are you working on now? EMK: Everyone who makes paper has tons of scraps. I have been running scraps through a paper shredder and weaving with them. After I have made a pretty substantial piece of reconstructed paper, I plan to print on it. Right now it looks like a very stiff rag rug. It's my experiment.  BE: How will you print on it? EMK: I wet down the paper strips before I insert them in as weft. This makes the fabric denser and I am able to pack down the paper strips so that they cover more of the warp. Then they dry and are crisp again. In order to print on it, I'm going to have to wet it. I'll be very interested to see what happens. I think I'll do something very simple and monochromatic. There is so much texture to the paper itself, even more so because of the weaving of the strips. You know, you always have to push yourself. You always have to say, "Well, what am I going to do next? What would be different?"  BE: And that's where you come up with different techniques that you can use in new works. EMK: It’s just that I am horribly consistent, so I go back to the weaving tradition that I was raised with.