Visiting other cultures stimulates our minds, challenges our coping skills, and sometimes gives us insight into issues we face back home. Such travel can be a metaphor for the process of examination, rumination, and expression that is the process of making art: process = art = journey = life Handmade paper offers the practitioner a mixture of science, history, cultural diversity, and even detective work. Particular characteristics seem to accompany artists for whom paper is primary as a medium, passion, or process. They are much more open and sharing than artists who specialize in more traditional media, like painting. Paper artists go to great lengths to discover the secrets of papermaking, old and new. They are also eager to gather together to talk about, look at, and discuss papermaking. Hand papermaking is also a satisfying research objective. Most cultures have some historic or potential connection to papermaking. The research pursuit offers an interesting dialogue between those with the luxury to seek, explore, and interact and those they interact with (many of them at the economic edge, often either the last practitioners of an old tradition or the very young, unaware of their own culture’s paper past). The artist-papermakers who meet these people are often inspired to use their skills and ingenuity to restore a traditional process or introduce one as a new livelihood. Integrating handmade paper into ethnic traditions is often an effective means of empowering marginalized individuals. A dialogue can create awareness of new potential in an ancient art. Sometimes this results in collaborative projects that use hand papermaking to provide solutions to economic pressures. For some, there is the unusual opportunity to use art to try to bridge economic differences. The art gives these projects a different orientation and helps them engage communities quickly; the result of these collaborative efforts can be beneficial for all. Sometimes the individual artist gains additional technical expertise. More important is the self-knowledge gained from direct involvement with people from a different culture and with their rituals. I used the occasion of Hand Papermaking’s fifteenth anniversary to pose questions to a group of artists who have either been written about in the magazine or have written for it. I was curious to see how their experiences overseas have affected their lives and their personal work. Frequently these artists did not get very involved in a foreign culture on their first trip overseas. On subsequent and longer trips, they were more likely to become personally connected. Helmut Becker first left his native rural Canada to travel to New York city in search of new ways to make deeply embossed prints. While there he met Douglass Morse Howell, who was heavily involved in research into processing and beating linen fibers to produce strong papers. Seeing Howell’s research triggered two memories for Becker: his mother describing the preparation of flax for linen clothing in her native Russia, and his father growing flax on the family farm. His need for stronger papers combined with his memory of how the plants grew set Becker off on what has become a lifetime’s effort to research every step of the processing of flax and hemp, to enable the fiber to remain long and flexible. Becker has since traveled to Japan, to China (for a month in 1990), and several times to Europe, especially the Netherlands and Germany. Some of these trips incorporated his ongoing research into fiber processing as well as his interest in the history of papermaking. Becker has harvested green hemp to compare its qualities with that of fully ripe flax. He has compared dew retting with clay-bottomed pond retting with snow retting with stream retting with tank retting. Becker has similarly explored how to cook the fibers with the mildest chemicals and to beat using the gentlest methods, to leave the fibers as intact and strong as possible. After years of meticulous, careful research, Becker maintains respect and reverence for the life and vitality of the fiber, as well as for the other natural elements—sun, water, earth—that are important for the growth of the fibers and their interdependence in his work. Becker approaches his art with the same patience as his research into making the papers. Some of his aesthetic ideas are instructed by his work in ferreting out hand papermaking in history. For example, he uses the form of the pi disk, an important symbol first used in Han dynasty China. Relating to the sun shining in heaven and referring to the Emperor, a stone pi disc was worn around the neck when one traveled on court business, as a kind of passport. Becker’s Solar Pi Disc, 1999, exemplifies his adoption of this form, for which he used earth-retted hemp fibers. In this piece, the solar disc has a literal meaning, communicating the harmony and balance of the natural world. Robbin Ami Silverberg travels regularly to Austria, where she teaches a seminar on papermaking and artists books. She also makes annual trips to Hungary, her husband’s homeland, participating there in collaborations, exhibitions, and projects. But South Africa has had perhaps the biggest influence on Silverberg and her work. She first visited Johannesburg in 1995, to participate in an International Biennial and to lecture on artists’ books. Two years later, she returned to teach a book arts seminar and some workshops, and to take part in artist book collaborations. She returned for a month in February 2001 to consult on papermaking as a cottage industry and to offer training. Silverberg’s return trips have each been more specifically involved and her personal contacts have deepened. I found as a result the blurred lines between “art,” “craft,” “tribal art” ...in particular, some examples of artwork there that brought these labels together... [were] extremely helpful in my process to resolve similar concerns. Most important to Silverberg in South Africa was the resourcefulness of artists working with modest materials and seeing how little this affected the quality or impact of their work. The mixture of first and third worlds and the difficulty of accomplishing everyday activities heightened her appreciation of her South African colleagues’ commitment to their work, their country, and their people. In addition to the expansion of her vision, Silverberg started using human hair in her work. She says, “I continue to find its personal references and tactility an assertive counterpoint to [my] paper.” In a recent work, I Desist, Silverberg has expanded beyond the book format to a sculptural piece combining brush bristles of flax and human hair with an unexpected image in a dustpan. The result is an enigmatic work with complex meanings. Peter Thomas has traveled to Europe, the Philippines, and Africa. His first trip to the Wookey Hole Mill in England, in 1980, resolved a technical difficulty he had been having in pressing his own handmade papers. The experience solidified his interest in seeking out techniques for making the best possible sheets of paper. In addition to the technical information gained from his early travels, Thomas attributes the friendliness of the papermakers he met, both active and retired, with inspiring his primary life work: researching the history of handmade paper, then publishing and producing books about this research, printed by him on his own handmade papers. Research for one of his publications, The History of Papermaking in the Philippines, gave Thomas his first exposure to Asia and a third world economy. He was profoundly struck by economic inequities and this led to his participation in international aid organizations, on his return home. When Thomas went to Zimbabwe to advise Walter Ruprecht on his Cartolina Paper Mill, he experienced the frustration of not being able to cross racial barriers and befriend the African papermakers. Each subsequent trip seems to have affected Thomas more deeply than the last, based on the documented information found in his books. While he took slides and photographs to record his observations, Thomas also made watercolor paintings, to reflect his emotional responses. As he continued to travel and he gained expertise as a papermaker, Thomas felt increasingly compelled to share helpful information to improve his hosts' practices. He now sees the dilemma that such sharing presents and fears that sometimes a well-meaning suggestion may plant a seed of discontent. This is a genuine dilemma for all artist-travelers who want to help their counterparts abroad. Raising expectations, creating doubt, or making unrealistic commitments that are hard to keep once one has returned home are some of the dangers that threaten these relationships. In Africa, Thomas and his wife, Donna, were asked to make artist’s books for an exhibition. He found it liberating to create a unique book that neither required collaboration with a fellow author or artist nor addressed a historic topic. He continues to make unique books, enjoying the freedom of expression that they allow. I hope that one day Thomas will exhibit these more personal works. Karen Stahlecker is another artist whose travels and artistic evolution have become inseparable. Inspired by her studies of papermaking using bast fibers with Tim Barrett, Stahlecker went to Japan. Her research and experiences there confirmed for her the appropriateness of using translucent papers produced by the nagashizuki method for her work, which largely concerns the fragile balance between humans and the natural world. Her first visits to Europe, to participate in the Lausanne Biennial and to see historic European papermaking locales, invigorated Stahlecker, bringing to life the images and concepts she had previously seen only in books. In 1990 Stahlecker traveled to Düren, Germany, for the opening of that year’s Paper Biennial at the Leopold Hoesch Museum. After Düren, she journeyed to Prague, Bratislava, the countryside of Slovakia, and Berlin. She enjoyed exploring the ancient buildings of Europe and the relationship between historic architectural styles and the landscapes from which they originated. She reveled in the realization that the arches of Gothic cathedrals, which seem to defy nature, were actually inspired by the way the branches of tall, straight, northern European trees meet. These architectural connections echoed her already deep involvement in the cross-fertilizations between the hand of man and the world of nature. Stahlecker’s life back in the states, between her travels, provided quite a contrast. She lived in Alaska for several years, where the omnipresence and intervention of the environment increased her involvement with nature as well as an awareness of its vulnerability at the folly of man—particularly exemplified by the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. Stahlecker also traveled extensively by truck throughout the Midwest and western United States, to participate in artist residencies and teach workshops. A condensed and portable studio enabled her to work on the road. This meant creating very small works, in contrast to the extremely large and complex museum installations she had created in her Alaska studio. Some of the small on-the-road projects reveal the processing of Stahlecker’s European travels and aesthetic explorations. An example is Rose Window, a unique artist’s book created in 1995. In this small tour de force, the structurally sophisticated accordion-folded interior opens to a cathedral-like freestanding form. Though small, the book exemplifies all the sculptural brilliance and subtle light effects seen in Stahlecker’s major installations. Her substitution of plant inclusions for the traditional iconography of gothic rose windows is totally consistent with her personal outlook. This small work illustrates the refinement of technique that Stahlecker’s travels and investigations have helped facilitate.  Stahlecker’s longest overseas residency to date was her 1997 six-month Fulbright Residency in Poland, where she established a hand papermaking program and conducted local research to identify indigenous plants appropriate for making paper from. She also had two exhibitions in Poland. Her ambitious schedule there demanded a subsequent fallow period, to absorb her experiences on the road. Stahlecker’s foreign experiences provide inspiration for her sculptural forms and her interaction with the natural fibers she uses. At the same time, her own response to nature continues to inform her work. The most powerful travel influences on Tom Leech’s work and life have been seven trips he has made to Tibet since 1990 and a single trip to Turkey. On these journeys he has explored two important aspects of his work: papermaking and marbling. Leech’s first two trips to Tibet were with the Everest Environmental Project, which dealt with the alarming amount of trash left by climbing expeditions on Mt. Everest. At Everest Base Camp, Leech recycled paper trash into new paper. For a young monk at the nearby Rhongbu Monastery, this sparked memories of learning papermaking in his village school. The possibility that recycling paper may be relevant, coupled with a desire to research traditional Tibetan paper, took Leech back to Tibet in 1995 with four other Paper Road/Tibet project members (myself included). Leech has returned four more times with the Paper Road project, most recently a three-month residency at the project’s Lhasa partner, the Jatson Chumig Welfare Special School, in the summer of 1999. For Leech, exploration and research into the techniques of traditional Himalayan style papermaking answers a hunger to learn all he can about the earliest papers. He wants to create a surface with maximum responsiveness and expressiveness, both for himself and for those with whom he collaborates. Learning how to make paper the “original” way (the Tibetan/Nepalese method) has given me deeper insights into not only what this “paper stuff” is, but what it potentially can be. Experiencing Istanbul while attending an international gathering of marblers in 1997 had a different effect for Leech. Having studied the traditional Turkish method of marbling using ink and gall, he had been using acrylics for some time. Seeing historic examples of the classic marbling and personally meeting contemporary masters of the tradition further convinced Leech that the simpler use of acrylics “not only allow[s] a person to work in multiple layers, but … call[s] for it.” For Leech, layers of marbling and the depth they allow—in contrast to the Western stereotype of marbling as a flat design medium—are the art’s most appealing characteristics. He enjoys creating an image that directly confronts the real-life phenomenon in which seemingly contradictory situations coexist. He finds that marbling enables the intersection of the simple and the complex, the visual and the psychological. Leech achieves this same effect in his paintings through the use of interference colors, which contain their own complement and shift as the viewer changes position relative to the work. A meditator since he was twenty, Leech is drawn to Tibetan papermaking and Turkish marbling for their connection with the universal. Tibetan Buddhism and the role that traditional handmade paper plays in the faith influence him increasingly. He also feels drawn to the spiritual nature of marbling, which developed as a Sufi art and is connected with meditative practice. He made a recent work, a long accordion book on handmade Tibetan paper, at the Paper Road/Tibet project in Lhasa. Leech used a stamp he carved from an eraser to hand stamp 646 chorten images on the pages of the book. Each was to represent one of the 6,000 monasteries destroyed in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. I’ve printed, quite literally, millions of images in my life, but never has the physical act of printing been so profoundly moving. Watching printers in Tibet reprinting the lost books of Buddhism as an act of merit comes to mind. My plan is to continue making these books and images until 6,000 chorten have been printed. Leech has brought home with him a sense of the conscious present. He has no interest in doing a piece if he knows what it will look like at the outset. If a piece begins to feel familiar, he lets it flow off in new directions. Dorothy Field has returned many times to the same places in Nepal, India, Japan, China, Korea, Bhutan, Sikkim, Burma, and Thailand, seeking information about traditional hand papermaking and textiles as well as scattered Jewish communities. Field’s trips have generally been taken with her husband and daughter, and they have stayed on the road for many months. Her long stays and return trips enabled her to first observe and document techniques, then note changes from visit to visit. Return trips to locales have allowed Field to focus on ...how the paper and textiles were used, particularly as a way of communicating with the spirit world. I was also very interested in analyzing paper products, trying to see which approaches supported and energized the local culture and the people working in the projects, which ones exploited the people and disregarded the local culture. Field’s extensive observation of papermaking processes practiced in relatively untouched remote villages gives her a rich background and expertise in all types of Asian papermaking, both the earliest, practiced in southeast Asia and in Himalayan cultures, and those practiced in China, Korea, and Japan. Field’s interactions with these papermakers are by now intuitive and complex. Of all the cultures she has visited, Field is most drawn to India and Nepal. She was challenged by the juxtaposition of poverty and the social and cultural richness she found in Hindi cultures. Despite exhaustive observation and research, she says she still does not understand Hindi philosophy but she feels it is brilliant, perhaps because it enables its practitioners to accommodate that very incongruity. Hindus speak of tirthas, places where you can cross to the sacred. I feel very lucky to have experienced this crossing without ever being prepared for it in advance. In village India everyone is an artist. There is no separation between life and art as we conceptualize it in the West. ...Over time I’ve seen the artist’s job as creating tirthas for himself or herself to touch the infinite. And when it works for the artist, [there is a] good chance it may create a bridge for those who see the art. Field is particularly interested in metaphysical and spiritual uses of paper and textiles as artisan products, and her own work relates most closely to this aspect of her research. Field and her family live and work on a farm in British Columbia. The back acreage is an evergreen forest, punctuated occasionally by Field’s site works: paper prayer flags or constructions that she has left to interact with nature. She works in small quantities of paper, using simple, non-invasive methods to process the fibers. Her studies of textiles, in particular the weaving of shifu (cloth made from spun paper thread), often lead to the creation of imaginative clothing and personal objects. An example of this is Kobo Daishi Coat. The jacket, weighted with rounded river stones and dyed with earthen pigments, is matched by a hat and a bag of seed, for feeding birds in the woods. The work was inspired by Field’s desire to walk with Kobo Daishi, a Japanese monk who circumambulated Shikoku island in the ninth century. Field has worn the Kobo Daishi Coat and walked her own woods, experiencing a modern-day pilgrimage. Field’s personal involvement with ritual and her unabashed blending and borrowing of spiritual elements from many cultures and religions gives a veracity to her work and helps her further empathize with those whose craft she has observed. She has created an unbound, Tibetan-style book chronicling the types of beans grown on her farm, the types of light encountered, and the kinds of plants she has collected to eat. She keeps it housed under a pillow, inspired by Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, which lists all of the tenth-century Japanese writer’s likes and dislikes of the Imperial court. All of the artists I contacted described extreme physical difficulty and even personal fear when going into remote areas, where they often felt unprepared or at risk. But their desire and ability to be open, showing interest and respect for the traditions they observed, usually bridged the tremendous handicap of being ignorant of the local language. (For visually oriented people, temporary suspension of verbal communication while abroad may benefit their artwork, if not the accuracy of their documentation.) All emphasized the importance of the personal connections they made while overseas and the difference that those interactions have had on their lives since. The longer they experienced another culture, the more involved they became and the more the experience has replayed in their personal lives and work back home. All have, in one way or another, brought home the lessons of living close to one’s art and this conscious decision has enabled them to make the transition back to life in North America. Always, for those who have had a taste of the richness and honesty of purposeful travel, it takes very little to call them once again to the paper road.