A new article about some pieces I have on display at the American Craft Council. The show also features two large works from my wife Ioana Stoian – including our favorite joint effort, Unison. Here’s a snippet from the included Q&A in the article, which I highly recommend checking out: Who and what inspires you? I draw a lot of inspiration from shapes and patterns I see every day – both in nature and in the manmade world. After working with tessellations for so many years, I see them intrinsically in anything that repeats – they always catch my eye, and I am drawn to them. This often manifests itself later on in a piece, sometimes rather unknowingly. I was heavily influenced by the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists, as a teenager; I grew up in a military family, and I spent one particularly isolated summer after a cross-country relocation cooped up in my room with a stack of great art books on that period in history. I had not known such a thing existed, artistically, …

Hello All, I’m part of an artist roundtable talk this coming February 16th at 6PM at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, one of three panelists discussing our Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship projects for 2016. My project is an innovative exploration of my beloved bio-paper – paper grown in-situ from bacterial cellulose – using this amazing and unusual paper to create a limited edition of books featuring the poetry of e.e. cummings. Using the unique properties of the translucent paper, I will be embedding the text at varying depths within the paper itself, resulting in quasi-three dimensional wordplay; which makes the work of e.e. cummings perhaps the ideal source text to use. More on this to come, but in the meantime, please enjoy these photos of work samples I created for the talk next week, and a short video clip of a fresh sheet of this paper after harvesting. The work samples are based on the concept I am exploring for my project; laminations of thin sheets of biofilm with embedded text objects between …