Studio Associate / Leigh Holden
"I pulled my first sheet of paper on a summer afternoon in 1998 at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. It was hot and muggy; I don’t know how we got that paper to dry. It was the summer between my first and second years at the University of Alabama where I was studying bookbinding and letterpress printing. I knew about paper, about grain direction and tear strength, about hot and cold press, about wove and laid surfaces. But there was a fundamental shift when I made that first sheet of paper. It was no longer a (mostly) static substrate; it now had life and character. It became paper per se paper: something that asserted itself intrinsically as itself. Since then, I have been distracted by many things, but I always return to hand papermaking. In its rhythm and routine I find a touchstone, a deep and satisfying sense of rightness."