Lutz is an accomplished papermaker and combines traditional Asian and European techniques of casting and sheet making in her work. As early as her teenage years, when she became interested in recycling, she began experimenting with different kinds of unconventional materials for papermaking. She had success with pineapple tops, seaweed and several other types of vegetable waste. While in graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art studying sculpture in the late 1960s, she began working in the papermaking shop. A few years later, while teaching at Yale, Lutz received a grant for a month-long trip to Japan and Korea to study papermaking methods. She says she learned a lot on this trip by visiting papermakers in their studios and observing their methods. She also cites a visit from Timothy Barrett to Yale, for introducing her to the creative possibilities of European papermaking.   Lutz's experiments over the years allowed her to develop her own hybrid approach to papermaking. For example, she devised an oversized collapsible mold that is an adaptation of Korean techniques. She sews a form out of cotton muslin, which she shapes with removable attachments made of wood or brass. In addition Lutz sometimes makes molds out of plaster, and uses sand, Perlite and similar materials for casting high-shrinkage paper. Lutz conducts many of these tests using different materials and processes, in order to understand the range of variation possible and to gain more creative control. She likes to work with both flax, a standard material for European paper, and abaca because of the effects possible with "overbeating." This process causes a permanent physio-chemical change in the pulp which produces paper that is very thin, transparent, hard, and dense. Often the paper becomes much darker in color due to shrinkage during drying. Lutz uses selective restraint as the paper dries, and likes to think of this as "a collaboration with the natural processes of the drying paper."    This exhibition, Lutz's second at Gallery Joe, features freestanding floor sculptures, wall pieces, as well as hanging sculptures. Using fastidious workmanship, which is nearly invisible at times, she has created a body of work inspired by nature's processes of growth and decomposition – and all of the thirty-five pieces have formed different kinds of relationships with the "found" architectural spaces of Gallery Joe. These spaces include a bright, storefront area subdivided into three linked exhibition areas and a barrel-vaulted, windowless room that once served as a security vault. Interestingly, the neoclassical building was originally a bookstore, operated by a group of Quakers, so it seems fitting that many of the shows in the gallery, this one included, carry on this tradition of quiet study and reflection. The show is installed in a manner that respects the autonomy of each piece, while allowing natural relationships to be discovered (between one piece and another; between a piece and its location) as the show is viewed. All of the pieces are displayed without signage of any kind, at the insistence of the artist, and appear fresh and open to exploration because of that.    The majority of the pieces (twenty-nine out of thirty-five) were made in 2004, during Lutz's phenomenally productive sabbatical from teaching sculpture at Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, PA. Hovering in a space near the main entrance to the gallery, untitled (balance), a spindly tower of natural and man-made materials, invites close visual examination. Lutz uses paper in this sculpture, as well as the others in the show, in the shape-shifting role of glue, sheet or three-dimensional object and it takes a focused eye to sort out some of the transitions between materials. A curved slice of oak branch and a rippled chunk of concrete (cast in a plastic bag) support a thinner woody vine balanced on a concealed pivot. Then, poised on one end of the vine, an oval cast paper form appears like a stone from one side and a translucent paper window to an ambiguous space on the other. Held in tension by a thin gray thread attached to the base, the piece, placed in this extremely vulnerable location, is a study in materials, weight, and balance.    Casually leaning against a nearby wall, untitled (leaning), by contrast suggests a lazy insouciance. It is made out of a hollow cylinder of poplar bark, about 30 inches long, that appears to be gripping a round slab of rotted flax paper – like a sculpture that made itself from a convergence of musty pulp and decomposing bark. The two components might have dried together in that position, but both were shaped individually and then fitted together by Lutz. In untitled (hemisphere with light source), a stick protrudes from the wall, making a natural holder for a cut-open gourd that's been sealed off by a round piece of greenish paper. The thin paper on the front is seamless – it was assembled from miniscule strips of paper with tweezers and a needle – and looks like a liquid substance. It covers the front and the rest of the gourd and it contracted when it dried. A small coppery light seems to shine within it. Our senses struggle to make out something inside. Like Plato's cave, we're not sure what it is. Its relationship to its surroundings seems secure and pseudo-utilitarian.   In a group of pictorial wall pieces, Lutz takes a more minimal approach, and these pieces seem to flutter gently in front of the wall. Untitled (double veil), untitled (subterranean veil) and untitled (veil/copper) are all planar surfaces of about 42 x 30 inches made of layers of paper with different levels of opacity and transparency. Untitled (veil/copper), for example, has a vertically oriented rectangle of heavy opaque mottled gray-green paper with a teardrop-shaped section of a thinner translucent peach-colored paper in the center, like a muted flame of light in a cloudy sunset sky. Untitled (green box viewfinder) is a beautiful little pale green paper box with a narrow window made from more translucent white paper. There's a mysterious rectilinear doughnut shape visible just beneath the surface.    Another group of very small wall sculptures have a gentle humor that captivates our senses and piques our curiosity, as they seem to flip around and squirm against their spot on the wall. Untitled (paper speaking stone) is made with a small flat (ostensibly monochromatic) stone with a large "mouth" that emits a thin fluttering piece of high-shrinkage, unbleached flax paper. On closer examination, the colors of both parts – gray, slate blue, bone, rust – are rich and carefully balanced. The thin rigid piece of paper has been pulled and burnished by hand leaving white marks similar to the erosion in the stone. Untitled (wave hull), constructed from half of a dried avocado skin juxtaposed with a rippling, unbelievably graceful section of pigmented flax paper. The paper is an example of the processes of over-beating and selective restraint, as the paper is pressed into a mold of wide-wale corduroy and dried naturally, without any pulling or stretching. This piece tempts us to study an odd congruence between the grayish rotten-looking coloration of both components and to be seduced by their tactile charms.    The three large sculptures installed in the vault gallery attempt to build more formal relationships internally, as well as between aspects of the building's architecture and each other. Installed about halfway down the wall on the right side of the room is untitled (non-native board), a wide Kauri pine board, which is securely positioned perpendicular to the wall with a chunk of mulberry burl on the bottom and a strip of Ailanthus bark on the top. Each of its sides offers a different point of view. An irregular oval hole cut into the center of the board (which resembles an artificial knothole in this perfect board!) has been covered on one side with an amber-colored paper with a watermark spiral based on the annular growth rings of a tree and on the other with a constructed ailanthus bark protrusion with an open wound. This piece is all about stability, location, and the linking of a specific piece of floor and wall.    Working imaginatively with location in two larger bark and paper pieces installed in the vault, Lutz teases imagery from the relationships between pairs of large, bulky forms. In one, titled From the Correspondent, Not Equivalent series: untitled (land shoe and Leviathan), a thin cable that goes through a hook in the ceiling joins the two parts. On one end a heavy oval chunk of bark-covered wood acts as an anchor, on the other end a 3-foot "shoe," made of cast paper and beech bark with a texture like elephant skin, hangs just below eye level. Another piece from the same series, untitled (wall grotesque yearning for a breathless floating mountain), has an anchor shaped form fabricated from many small pieces of beech bark. It is shaped like a deformed toad and attached to the wall at about chest level. A string emerges from this anchor and weightlessly suspends a miniature mountainous landscape, made of cast paper with a smooth and curved transparent paper sheet for the bottom, about 7 feet from the floor. Lutz explains that in the pieces in this series, "Their correspondence is both actual and implied." Like humorous, visual fairy tales, the discrete imagery of these pieces is isolated, yet contingent. The forms are balanced – as is their sheer physical weight – and defined by their location.    By imitating, extrapolating, and expanding from nature's processes, Lutz's new works achieve an eloquent state of artifice and balance in the manmade architectural world of the gallery. Their workmanship has none of the self-forgetful reverie of repetition that is a part of traditional craftsmanship. To the contrary: Lutz works with sustained and acute consciousness, making tenaciously specific sculptures that awaken the senses. As she says, "I just try to look… and be open and non-judgmental… to see what's available and use it." The pieces she makes have eased into the role of natural objects with unique, meaningful, and intensely private relationships with the world around them.