Paper pieces pep up downtown display

The St. Albert Place Visual Arts Council consists of five guilds, some of which are pretty well known in the community and even across the province. The painters’ and potters’ guilds top the list, and the quilters’ guild is pretty popular also.

Then there are the back runners. Even though this is the botanical arts city, the floral arts society remains mostly in the shadows. The paper arts guild is right there, too.

All of that reclusiveness is slow to change, but change can and does come sometimes in unexpected doses.

In mid-April, the Alberta Craft Council opened up a three-month exhibition of works from Alberta’s contemporary paper and book artists, and St. Albert shows up with some strong representation.

Janice Peters has been with the St. Albert Paper Arts Guild for a decade now, as long as the guild has been in existence. She said that the membership of 16 hasn’t changed much in that time either, but there is always work in progress. That’s much the same story from the guild’s provincial counterparts in the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Arts Guild. Peters is the co-ordinator for the northern chapter of CBBAG.

When the craft council put out a call for submissions from paper and book artists, the result took some people by surprise: more than 200 pieces were submitted by 61 artists. The final show is comprised of the efforts of 28 of those people.

Peters surprised herself by contributing a tunnel book, a form of art that she wasn’t familiar with.

“I’ve never made that particular structure before. I made it for a challenge that we did within the paper arts guild, funnily enough,” she admitted. “In this particular instance, I started off with the structure and that’s not usually what I do. I start off with an idea. In this particular case because I wanted to make a tunnel book, I started off with the structure and then tried to figure out what I was going to make, to make a book around it.”

Her work, Lost and Found, is made of Stonehenge paper and looks to be inspired by Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the documentary about early cave art. She mentioned that she had been reading two separate books that both referred to prehistoric cave paintings and she went from there.

Paper and book art might now be rising to greater prominence. Pulp Paper Pages has some very interesting works in it, including the paper quilled pieces An English Garden – a teacup – and Baba Yaga’s Belegged Birdhouse by Evangeline Enns, and Diana Un-Jin Cho’s jogakbo patchwork on Korean mulberry.

The entire gallery is available at www.pulp-paper-pages.com.