Pulp & Bind: Paper & Book in Southern Appalachia
January 26, 2024 – June 2, 2024 | Fort Gallery
Pulp & Bind brings together 18 artists working across the diffuse region of Southern Appalachia who are deeply engaged with the mediums of paper and book as a form and a concept. The structural potential of paper, its emotive qualities and familiar insinuations, and the alternately highly-refined and visibly handmade possibilities of the material are just some of the recurrent themes across this exhibition. Bringing together this diverse group of objects, bound by a seemingly humble, familiar medium, reflects our region’s heterogeneity and challenges assumptions about Craft and Appalachian creative production at large.
This exhibition is the culmination of a series of survey-oriented group exhibitions undertaken by BRAHM to map the state of Craft across the region through a lens of artists working with an acute focus on craft-associated mediums. Paper and book are an especially ripe site for this exploration. This medium and form—and their concomitant literary, industrial, and material associations—lend themselves to artworks that are at once deeply familiar and wholly unexpected. Monumental sculpture belies its relatively insubstantial weight, meticulously cut paper renders decidedly graphic, contemporary compositions, and handmade artists’ books upend expectations for linear narrative and storytelling.
Exhibited artists include Lela Arruza, Charles Clary, Frank Lee Craig, Rosa Dargan-Powers, Lorene Delany-Ullman, Georgia Deal, Daniel Essig, Vicki Essig, Kirk Fanelly, Lotta Helleberg, Ann Marie Kennedy, Kirsten Kindler, Daphne Lee, Chieko Murasugi, Tatiana Potts, Jody Servon, Leigh Suggs, Nicole Uzzell, and Gibby Waitzkin.
This exhibition was curated by Ian Gabriel Wilson, Curator of Exhibitions & Collections, and Bella Sollosi, Curatorial Assistant.
Leigh Suggs, Pacing the Races VI, handcut acrylic on Yupo, 40x30 in. (image courtesy of the artist)
