Every year on a crisp November morning, a few dozen MFA students, faculty, and community members–with wheelbarrows and loppers in hand–assemble at a small garden at the University of Iowa’s Oakdale Campus. It’s the annual kozo harvest, part of an immersive, year-long paper arts experience in which University of Iowa Center for the Book (UICB) students grow, harvest, process, and ultimately make works of art from the young kozo, a mulberry tree species used in traditional Japanese papermaking.
The day’s activities are led by Nick Cladis, an assistant professor of instruction who specializes in traditional papermaking at UICB. Cladis explains how to cut and gather the plant before the garden becomes a bustling scene of jovial participants helping one another cut and gather piles of kozo to transport back to the Center for the Book paper mill. There, it is steamed in large kettles, has its bark peeled from the pith, and is drying on a clothesline by the afternoon. As is tradition, Cladis thanks the crew’s efforts with a steaming bowl of Japanese curry.
“My goal with teaching is to create a welcoming space for students, and I've tried to create a sense of community for students in this space,” Cladis explains. “The harvest is an opportunity for us all to come together, and when we can all come together to do this hands-on activity, we can feel that we are that book arts family.”
A textile approach
Third-year MFA student, Kelsey Voy joined the kozo harvest crew last fall. Cladis describes her as the event’s biggest cheerleader, with an apt approach of using the strong kozo fibers in textile artworks.
With a background in textiles and fashion design, she combined her great-aunt’s old quilt with kozo to make paper for her thesis book project, Press Open. Voy used the book as an opportunity to speak to her aging relative, with whom she and her mother share a craft lineage. She also incorporated words from letters her great-uncle sent her-great aunt in the 1950s.
“She's so late into her life, I don't know too much about her, and there's things I would like to ask her, but I feel like I don't have the words to,” Voy explains. “I put that feeling into this book.”
Her thesis exhibition, At the Seams of Our Passage, also featured a large cloak made of stitched together napkins made entirely with Iowa-grown kozo.
“I've been very impressed with her ability to bring a lot of aspects together in her work and including her own personal experience with a sensitivity to material, and research,” Cladis says, citing Voy’s use of the University of Iowa Women’s Archives. “She's been such an active person in our community, and seeing her work coalesce this year has been really special.”
A reverse cultural experience
First-year MFA student, Nana Takano made her debut at the kozo harvest last fall, gathering cut trees and helping her instructor tie up bundles. Originally from Gunma Prefecture, Japan, Takano has taken the opportunity at UICB to learn more about her cultural background and its deep-rooted ties to papermaking, a practice which she says is traditionally passed down through Japanese families and therefore less accessible to the public. Her cultural and artisanal education is fostered by Cladis, who lived in Japan for several years and who Takano considers a father figure in her paper arts journey.
“The experience here is amazing,” Takano says of her time at UICB. “It's really different than a normal MFA because we will learn the foundation together.”
Among her artworks using kozo fiber includes an installation entitled A Layer of Love, which consists of a large sheet of interwoven layers of colorful fiber emblazoned with hanging fixtures and screen-printed Japanese lettering.
“I'm working with a concept of love that I received in Japan and that I received in America, and how it is different but how it is beautiful,” she says of her seven-foot-tall artwork.
Takano also made a miniature book representing milestones of development in her friend’s two-year-old child. The three-inch-square pages feature English and Japanese text as well as cut-out windows containing suspended pieces of unbeaten and dyed kozo fiber.
“They have a lacey kind of texture, which really inspired me to have those connections between mother and child represented,” she notes, comparing the pink, unprocessed kozo fiber to a placenta.
Cladis says Takano has demonstrated versatility in her use of kozo in paper, installations, and sculptures. “It's pushing the boundary of what kozo can be used for, and I find that that's a good way for her to express her ideas,” he says. “To be able to share this culturally-tied experience with Nana is special.”
Finding a voice in book arts
Cladis strives to give his students an immersion into Japanese paper arts beyond the classroom and garden. This means taking the UICB cohort across the globe to paper mills in the village of Echizen, Japan, and inviting his Japanese friends to Iowa City to demonstrate their craft at the Japanese Papermaking Festival in the spring.
Above all, the instructor finds that his greatest satisfaction is seeing where the paper arts journey takes his students.
“Everybody approaches this handmade paper with a different perspective, and the way that I say it in class is about finding your voice in the field,” Cladis says. “We have students who are robust researchers who are becoming leaders in this field, and that has been the most fulfilling part of my job.”
