Recently I've been a papermaking and dyeing fiend! As you can see, I've been making paper with bingo sheets in them (straight from the Royal Canadian Legion Hall in Banff!), paper with swirls of sky and granite colours in them, and a ton of long dyed mountain-paper.

I love the 70's colour palette of the hard bingo cards!!

 

This map of Alberta's Rocky Mountain stratigraphy is fascinating and colourful!

Some of the inspiring colours from nature:

 

A sneak peak of the installation in progress

 

 And, of course, this post is marmot-approved!

The studio I'm printing in at the Banff Centre has the most wonderful retro Health and Safety signage. It somehow is much more satisfying to wear my safety goggles and gloves.

 

Inspired by these icons and the merit badges I used to get in Brownies (mini-Girl Guides), I've been working on my own set of real-life merit badges for everyday accomplishments!

 

(including updating my blog - finally a high-five!)

 

A little Batman and a Cosplay badge always goes well, as suggested by a friend.

 A bright yellow ink for maximum visibility!

 

Here's the first few, stitched together on the bus!

I've been working away on illustrating all 50 of the streets in Banff, and printed the new 'street map' up in a forest green.

 

 

Each street is represented, from Glen Crescent to Muskrat Street!

The screenprints are available at Banff's handmade paper store Gingko and Ink (https://www.facebook.com/gingkoandink) at 111 Banff Avenue Harmony Lane - so you can navigate my version of Banff!

Papermaking at Banff - continued!

A beautiful sky after a long day of making paper!

I had the pleasure of demonstrating how to make paper for the Life Long Learners Group from Canmore and Jim Olver.

I'm continuing to make sky paper using the lovely 15x15" frames - a size I've never seen before. I'm becoming very spoiled in the huge, beautiful paper studio - so much space! The most amazing beater! And a huge dry-box!

(photos courtesy of Jim Olver and The Banff Center)

And I am continuing my paper dying to track the colours of Banff. I am now onto stone-paper, after several amazing hikes through Johnston Canyon, Lake Louise, and up to Peyto Glacier:

Swirling pulp begins to resemble granite and moss

All kinds of coloured pulp to use!

I also collected all the bingo sheets after a rainy afternoon of bingo at Banff's Legion Hall, and made them into paper. I'm taking the Legion a sheet this week as a thank-you - they happily gave me all the used sheets!

And finally, a Northern Pocket Gopher from the Natural History Museum's collection. While I would dearly love to carry around a pocket gopher, I haven't managed to spot one yet.

Papermaking at the Banff Centre

I'm out at the Banff Centre making paper and prints using their beautiful Hollander Beater

 

 

 

I'm tracking the shifting colour of the sky through sheets of paper that trace the changes one sheet at a time.

a book of the sky!

The blue water left over from papermaking is amazingly beautiful on the floor.

 

The first 50 sheets!

 

 

The next day, back in the studio with swirls of indigo and purple 

The final book turns from fluffy blue skies at midday to the dark nights throughout 130 pages.

Next I have to make a box to keep the sky in!

What is your neighbourhood? The chaotic sprawl of urban skylines and alleyways is captured in the pop-up sculptures of ‘Terra Cognita’ – known land, marked territory, the many pieces of a person’s intimate geography they hold as the buildings closest to their hearts. ‘Terra Cognita’ is an ongoing series of photographic documentation of the neighbourhoods people create around themselves. Each person’s personal Montreal was collected by Natalie Draz through a series of meetings and neighbourhood walks.  As the body physically unfolds it reveals through photographs a visual kinetic document of the navigation of a single person through her or his personal map of Montreal.

Using photography, papercutting and paper engineering as both sculptural elements and a documentary practice, Terra Cognita captures the iconic architecture that becomes a person’s intimate mythology of their space - the liminal place between the interior self and the exterior neighbourhoods of personal geography. Inspired by medieval mythology of sleeping giants and defeated dragons forming the hills upon which towns are built, each of the people becomes the landscape upon which their cartographic identity extends from.

Exploring Intimate Narrative: Embroidered Arms, Pop-Up City and a Video Projection

a city made of the traces of my thoughts

buildings fold out into books

arms with poetic micro-narratives float on the floor

hidden behind a viewing booth of a glowing city, lit by the arms within