©1995...IN MEMORY OF KAKALI

Occasionally, I’ll post images and descriptions of art/craft projects from the past. When I was searching my archives for projects for my Indie Arts DVD Magazine interview, I unearthed this one. It’d been years since I had taken it out of it’s storage container, and it brought back fond memories of the times I taught at Kakali Paper on Granville Island, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in the mid 1990’s.

…in Memory of Kakali is a mixed-media collaborative book project measuring 20.5″ x 18″ x 5.5″. I made the box from foam board, corrugated cardboard, sticks, stone, waxed linen thread, coco beads, glass vials with cork tops, acrylic molding paste and paints, metal foil, plastic and handmade paper. Six vials contain fragments of the components used to make the box and one vial contains the colophon printed on a tiny Tyvek scroll. The interior of the box houses 17 sheets of paper, handmade by the artists who participated in the project.

Ann Vicente, Vancouver based paper and book artist and educator, devised and coordinated ‘…in Memory of Kakali’ to commemorate a dozen years of workshops and lectures at Kakali Paper, owned by artist Sharyn Yuen, who is also co-owner of Paper Ya. Ann invited former instructors and students to produce sheets of handmade paper, incorporating some aspect of the unique personality of Kakali Paper and/or how we were affected by the workshops.

©1995...IN MEMORY OF KAKALI • Book sculpture resting on top of seventeen sheets of handmade paper with lid and four vials removed

Seventeen people responded and sent their handmade sheets to Ann. She collated the sheets and sent everybody one set, and included a cover page and a list of each participant’s name printed on handmade papers. Our assignment was to organize or bind them into a ‘book object’. All seventeen art works were exhibited at Craft House Gallery on Granville Island, BC, in 1996. I attended the opening night ceremony and was quite impressed with the variety of ‘binding’ solutions. Very exciting stuff, to say the least.

©1995...IN MEMORY OF KAKALI • Detail of lid and my handmade paper piece

©1995...IN MEMORY OF KAKALI • Detail showing tops of seven vials with lid in place