Cast beeswax masks of their combined faces held candles on each table, and quivering light glowed softly through their joint features.    In another memory, Silverberg and Böröcz recount for me their 1997 winter trip to Japan. They had lived and slept at a papermaker's house: walls, windows, sliding doors, and screens were all handmade paper. It must have been like a cocoon, a translucent chrysalis, a fantasy embodied for someone whose life and art are so intimately connected with paper. Birds, trees, clouds seemed close enough to touch: what dreams could a paper house breed?   Whenever I visit Silverberg, passionate conversations on art blend with the peaceful surroundings. The Hollander beater grinds away and the birds sing. Dobbin Mill is a quiet oasis in a busy neighborhood of machine shops and factories. In the yard, vats alternate with flower and plant containers. The interior space is divided between living accommodations, a papermaking studio with an adjacent darkroom, and a dry studio, established in 1991 when Silverberg created the imprint Dobbin Books, with Böröcz and sculptor Louise McCagg as partners. They produce a wide range of book projects in collaboration with other artists and writers.    Touching on various aspects of Silverberg's background and training as an artist and papermaker, we recently talked about several of her pieces as useful stepping-stones for understanding her work. Busying about the studio as she fetched boxes, Silverberg, a blur of perpetual motion, made me think of wasps. They chew on tree bark and build out of the paper they make honeycomb-patterned structures, tan-colored like flax, one of Silverberg's favorite fibers.    Her involvement with books goes back a long way: as a child, she loved to read, and her relationship with books was already sensuous, physical: "I read voraciously. I ate books," she recalls, "and soon I wanted to make my own." This passion for books was compounded by a love for process and material; plaster was an early favorite. When Silverberg started studying sculpture at Princeton University's program for Visual Arts in 1976, she created small sculptures shaped like primitive books, similar to cuneiform tablets in which the scribe's stylus traced wedge-shaped characters.    At Princeton, Silverberg got her first exposure to paper as a material while studying with Robert Koch, then Curator of the Print Collection at the university's Art Museum. He taught her about connoisseurship of the print and how to understand prints by handling originals: a Durer, a forgery, a Rembrandt. "I discovered how stunning the substrate was. While I was holding the old paper, I asked him: �Why is this more beautiful than anything I know?'" He suggested she read about handmade paper.   Silverberg felt isolated at Princeton: her intuitive leanings ran against the grain of the dominant aesthetics of the 1970s: conceptualism, minimalism, the beginnings of computer art. The cool and austere ideals of Robert Morris and others was about "removing material," as Silverberg describes it. She, on the other hand, through her discovery of women sculptors like Eva Hesse, Ree Morton, and Jackie Windsor, was fascinated by process and wanted to redefine and reinterpret it. She loved what she calls Morton's "funny, absurd abandon" and Hesse's transformative powers. Like them, she tried to create objects that would not be clean or pure.    In 1980, with degrees in Visual Arts and History of Art, Silverberg started to create large paper spaces of newspaper strips woven together. But newsprint was not strong enough. Soon, after converting an old washing machine into a beater, she was making her own paper. She recycled paper or used abaca. "I wanted an affordable material, to be able to make installations you could walk in," she says. "These were like nests."    Unaware that hand papermaking was growing in the United States, Silverberg became convinced that Europe was the place to learn the technique she needed in papermaking. She was a lover of Austrian literature and philosophy�Wittgenstein, Schnitzler, Hoffmansthal�and chose Vienna as her base. She stayed almost three years in Vienna and met binder Michaela Komlósy, who immediately took her on as a partner: they would learn from each other.    A beginning papermaker, Silverberg set up a little mill in Komlósy's bindery and improved her technique through intensive practice and reading. Komlósy taught her bookbinding and restoration; Silverberg learned from the sixteenth and seventeenth century books that routinely came into the binder. She had to find out what types of handmade paper were needed to repair and rebind those books, and then make the papers. "I learned from the object back," she explains. "I realized that a book can only be as good as its materials, and it stayed with me."   When she returned to the United States in 1984, she took on an assistantship with Margaret Prentice at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, in Maine. She prepared pulp and helped in the studio; she listened and watched demonstrations. This helped her realize she already knew a great deal about papermaking.   In 1985 Silverberg became the assistant to artist and papermaker David Russell, owner of RPM studios in New York City. Silverberg helped with the studio's production of paper and with artist collaborations. She also started what would become a long-term involvement in teaching, working with students at a private school, where she set up a small book arts and papermaking program and she began teaching workshops at the Center for Book Arts, where she continues to teach. During this time, Silverberg also produced artists books, which she had started to make in 1981. She felt that books, as an art form, allowed her ultimate control and permitted her to incorporate her training and experience.    Unsatisfied with the compromises of working for others, Silverberg grew determined to have her own studio. From 1985 to 1989, she took on commissions for pulp-painted portraits and put aside the proceeds. In June 1989, with what she had saved and some that she borrowed, she set up Dobbin Mill in an old horse stable in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. Taking a leap of faith, she decided to make her living from the mill.   For the past ten years, Silverberg has managed to devote increasingly more time to her art and has exhibited in the United States, Europe, South Africa, and Canada. She has also collaborated with her husband and numerous other artists and writers in producing artists books. "Books are, to me, activated objects" states Silverberg. "They are culturally charged. They allow me to work with time, in a rhythmic sequence. They can be held and touched. [They allow for] a physical relationship that is missing in almost every other art form. And books necessitate engagement also in their making: I create my own material, so the content starts at the very beginning. The richest experience for me is when all aspects are engaged into the bookmaking: paper, binding, structure, images."   Recently, Silverberg returned to the three-dimensional forms that she had loved as a younger artist: sculpture as environment. Her work, always using her handmade paper as a major component, now ranges from the minuscule to the monumental.    In 1993, Böröcz and Silverberg got an invitation to exhibit together in a Hungarian museum in Pécs. They called the exhibit "The Egg Show". At the time, Silverberg was working on a series of huge paper drums, which she thought of as bulk containers of sound. While she wanted to continue working with the idea of containers and containment, she was attracted to the idea of a portable show that would fit into a single, easy-to-transport box. Silverberg's contribution, Two Dozen Thoughts About Eggs, is a series of tiny sculptures made from flax fiber and eggshells. Some are cast and some are hand-molded. One of her challenges was to use materials that are supposed to be very fragile�eggshells and paper�and make them very strong. To achieve this effect, she purposely overbeat her flax to obtain a translucent brittleness. The flax ranges in color from milky white to tan, with all shades of yellow in between, closely matching the eggshells' colors and textures. Paper is sometimes binder, sometimes substrate. Comments Silverberg, "The paper is transformed so that you have to guess what is egg and what is paper."   Another challenge was maintaining a sense of monumentality while working with a very small scale. With her modest materials, she succeeded in creating volume. When looking at photographic reproductions of Two Dozen Thoughts about Eggs, I think of the photographs taken by Brassai in Picasso's studio: balls of crumpled paper or folded cardboard molded in plaster look, in reproduction, like monumental sculpture. Humorous and light in spirit, Silverberg's organic forms resemble phalluses and breasts. Wrapped in strips of translucent, placenta-like paper, opening up like Japanese flowers, the bonsai-scaled sculptures become like gardens of the mind. Like much of Silverberg's work, they are ironic yet tender. As Hungarian critic Gabor Pataki wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition: "in the irony. . . [t]here is always a romantic element of a forgiving, perhaps even permissive, gentleness."   With the 1993 work Sisters: Five Smooth Stones, a collaboration between Silverberg and Louise McCagg, whose work deals with life and death masks, the artist book becomes a three-dimensional object that requires the reader's participation. A five-part box structure, it consists of two sets of five cast paper heads (life cast from Silverberg's and her four sisters' faces) and five different translations from Samuel 1.17.40. One of them reads: "Then David picked up his stick, cast forth five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in a shepherd's bag which served as his pouch. He walked out to meet the Philistines with his sling in his hand." The outside of the box has speckled, dark gray paper mixed with silver pigments, while the inside is a bright yellow. Small magnets permit the viewer to attach the heads on day-like or night-like backgrounds, choose the sequence, and arrange the configuration of the box. Cast in dark gray with mica powder, the sisters' heads were made using latex forms created by McCagg, who molded each face from life.    Stripped of their everyday appearance�with glasses and bushy hair�the faces seem lost in sleep or meditation and, rather than sisters, they become archetypes. "It is a book about time, transience, and transformation," Silverberg comments. "We wanted to depersonalize the sisters�make their representations into something different from our loaded baggage, into a metaphor for life trajectories. David used one stone against Goliath. What became of the others? What was their destiny?"   With titok (which means "secret" in Hungarian), a bookwork commissioned by Franklin Furnace Gallery for their final exhibit in 1996, Silverberg introduced a new kind of collaboration. ("Collaboration is an important part of my work," she says. "I found respect early on for the possibility of losing control and, in exchange, gaining access to another person's creative process.") This time, though, Silverberg asked twenty-one artists, writers, and musicians to send her information about a secret. As the dealer of secrets, She used their responses to create titok, collecting then recreating, altering, and sometimes even destroying the material they sent. The resulting bookwork consists of twenty-seven 4" blocks piled up to form a 12" by 12" cube. The boxes are closed or have peepholes on one of their sides. When handled, they rattle when shaken or give off an odor. Their interior and exterior faces are entirely covered with images combining color photocopies, transfers, black and white photographs, and handmade paper, in a mix of high and low material typical for Silverberg.    Like traditional fairy tales with several possible endings or contemporary Web novels with multiple entries, Silverberg's piece departs from a traditional, linear reading. The immediate association I had when handling titok was with the two Greek myths related to the architect Dedalus, both of which involve labyrinths, secrets, and what happens when you betray them.    The first myth recounts Dedalus's construction of the labyrinth for King Minos's Minotaur, and Dedalus's subsequent escape with his son, Icarus. The second myth is less well known. Dedalus lives anonymously in exile, but Minos wants revenge. He announces a competition, knowing that Dedalus will be too vain not to participate. The one able to string a ball of thread through the labyrinth of a conch shell will win a prize. Dedalus drills holes on each side of the shell and ties the thread to an ant's leg. He wins and is captured.    Contained in one of the boxes of titok, a ball of thread passes through a peephole. (Silverberg told me that the word "clue" derives from "clew", which means "ball of thread.") The structure itself, a three-dimensional labyrinth made of interactive blocks, reflects the arcane nature of secrets. "There is no one entry and no one exit to titok," Silverberg comments. " It is about reading a book by its cover, not turning the pages. Since a secret cannot be known without ceasing to exist, I want the reader to explore without understanding, experience the primacy of the senses over the brain."   While titok's structure alludes to children's blocks, Emandulo Re-Creation, a 1997 book, is modeled after the "exquisite corpse," a game invented by André Breton and the Surrealist group in Paris in the 1920s. Each participant draws a body part in sequence on a sheet of paper, then folds it to conceal the image and passes the paper on to the next draftsman. In the end, the entire sheet is unfolded, revealing surprising associations or dissonances.    While a guest artist-in-residence in Johannesburg at the Technikon & Artist Proof Studio, a printmaking facility set up for black community artists, Silverberg invited nineteen South African artists, chosen for their stylistic and demographic range, to participate in the project, along with Atta Kwami, from Ghana, Böröcz, and herself. She chose creation myths as a theme�Emandulo in Zulu means " in the beginning"�as each tribe and ethnic group in South Africa has its own creation story.    Each artist produced one page of the book. They could choose or make their own paper, using any printing or duplicating technique. The range of the finished book is stunning. The prints cover an array of techniques: aquatint, drypoint, linoleum, collograph, photolithography, color photocopy, and reduction woodcut on plywood. Interestingly, most artists resorted to a variant of the Adam and Eve story, instead of choosing local myths.    Their pages represent a wide range of artistic temperaments, from the formal and sophisticated to the bold and simple. Silverberg's contribution was a paper made from South African plants�corn husk and African lily�in light grays and ochres, with masculine and feminine figures drawn out of glued hair strands and fragments of eggshells placed in erogenous areas. Once everyone's pages were completed, she cut the whole stack into six sections. By opening the double-spined book in the middle, the reader can combine parts of each artist's work with that of any other, creating disquieting, hybrid figures�part man, part woman, part snake�as if going back to the chaos before creation.    64 Stones is a mural bookwork that Silverberg created for a 1997 group show at the Hebrew Union College Gallery, NYC: Rage/Resolution: From Family Violence to Healing in the Works of Israeli and American Women. In this installation the structure is fixed. Intense and aligned like a set of traumatic memories�fixed forever, forever relived�the sixty-four squares of flax paper, the color of pale skin, evoke a chessboard or a game of hopscotch.    Into the paper surface Silverberg embedded little stones, an allusion to the Biblical punishment of an adulteress by stoning. The surface bears tiny paper ribbons, pinned like butterflies and covered with Biblical text. The work stands out also in its subject matter, an indictment of the most patriarchal aspects of Jewishness. Though Silverberg went to a Jewish parochial school as a child in Canada and learned Yiddish and Hebrew, she had never before dealt with her Jewish heritage in her artistic work.    She culled quotes from the Talmud and from the morning prayer in which man thanks God for not making him a woman. Buried under the ribbons, other, more painful and personal memories, related to Silverberg's first, discordant marriage, are symbolized by a score of small, discarded, domestic objects: fragments of broken mirrors, rubber gaskets, orange peels, crumbs of bread, hair pins, and even Silverberg's old wedding ring. Flung angrily into the wet paper pulp, interspersed with markings made with burning tools, they are caught in the ochre surface like insects in old amber. Quotes, stones, and objects symbolize, says Silverberg "my incomprehension about why men can be thankful that they aren't women, that women can be seen as property and stoned, that those you love can hurt themselves and hurt you. "   In her largest piece to date, the monumental Three Scrolls (1994), each measuring thirty feet by two feet, Silverberg's art celebrates paper and light while going back to her earlier passion for sculpture and installation. Commissioned by the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, Silverberg decided to use minimal color so as not to compete with the ornate, Moorish-style museum and the multi-colored stained-glass cupola near which the scrolls would hang. Later the scrolls were exhibited at St. Peter's Cathedral in midtown Manhattan and at the Omni Gallery, in Long Island, New York. As a portable installation, the scrolls seemed to take on and enhance the very personality of the three sites where they were displayed.    Off-white, rust brown, and silver, with unreadable lines made of mica flakes and tea leaves, with eggshells ground into the pulp like the flickering of stars in a summer sky, the three large banners soar, suspended from the ceiling. Helen Harrison wrote in a review in the New York Times: "the medium not only carries the message, but embodies it."   In that sense, the scrolls also embody Silverberg's philosophy about papermaking and paper: beyond just showing a range of paper skills, she is interested in ideas and feels that paper artists are too often defined only by their material.   "Personally," Silverberg says, "I do not want be limited solely to the craft. Technique is for me what helps push artistic ideas. It has to be good so that it does not get in the way of seeing. � The magnificent potential of paper offers extraordinary possibilities of expressiveness. But the artist should be able to place the material in its proper context, not under- or overestimating it."   As her artwork makes clear, Silverberg is passionate about ideas and thinks that paper is an extraordinary and versatile material for asking questions about art and about life.

‍