Nikki Paper

[Damaris]

Thoseof you in Facebook quilling groups might have noticed a flurry of photos recently posted by the sister of today's featured quilling artist, Nikki Besser, whose fine work has been exhibited in Minnesota galleries since 2021. Because I was so impressed by Nikki's quilling style, not to mention that each post generated many positive exclamations and questions within Facebook, I reached out to interview her so that an even wider audience will be introduced to her art.

My artistic journey is an informal one, as I have no professional training or education in the arts (especially not in paper quilling). Aside from what I received as part of my high school education, I am primarily a self-taught artist. I learn through experimentation and good old-fashioned trial and error. I consider myself an emerging artist, not yet professional, but beyond hobbyist... I do hope to build more of a career in time.

Prior to stumbling upon paper quilling, I was practicing in oil paints and soft pastels. My experience in these mediums is the foundation for how I go about quilling. I often say I quill the way I paint... detail for detail, line for line, color for color, stroke for stroke.

After completing my first project, an 8" x 8" gray elephant, I was hooked on the craft. I knew then that I needed more supplies to see what else was possible... maybe now I could get an actual quilling tool! I purchased more paper and a rolling tool, and have been making quilled creations steadily since then, continuously scaling in size to allow for the expansion of detail and more room for possibility and storytelling. Many of my more recent pieces are approximately 25" x 30".

I live in far northern Minnesota, USA, a very remote area where internet reception is poor and the winters are long and dark so this is when I do the majority of my quilling. Time seemingly ceases as the weeks and months merge into a blur of mere memory and new artworks. I generally slow down through the summer to tend to other things such as my farm and garden hobbies.

I am very particular in the supplies I use and the list is quite simple. I only ever use 5mm foam core board as my canvas; I prefer this above all else. It doesn't warp and is easy to cut. Because I use a great many push pins in the process of creation, the foam board is least resistant to their use. It is the only type of backing I use, no paper, wood, or anything else.

I also only ever use 5mm paper strips as I find this width to be the perfect size and strength for me. (For all of you quilling artists using 3mm strips or smaller, I applaud you; I have not the patience for such.)

Tell us about the inspiration for your subject matter, as well as your process. So many of your portraits appear to have a story behind them and make me curious to know more about the characters.

If you are in my neck of the woods, it is currently on exhibition at the Great River Arts Center in Little Falls, Minnesota until June 20th, 2023. It will then be moved to the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hopkins, Minnesota until the end of July. I encourage you to experience seeing quilling in person because a camera simply cannot pick up the details and dimension that the naked eye can.

Our artist of the month is Nikki Panganiban Deschamp. Primarily specialising in paper art through the medium of edge quilling, origami, paper craft, paper cut and miniature paper art, Nikki really has done it all!

I have two, one for the on-edge quilling style the Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh with an abstract-ish style as I love to keep on making Starry Night. This particular one makes it look like I added my own spin on it and it looked amazing.

I had never thought or dreamt of becoming an artist let alone calling myself an artist. In December 2020 I bought a circuit maker after making a quilling artwork background for my wedding and got inspired to take quilling seriously.

The texture, it is a weird one, but one thing I love doing with my art is to touch them to feel the smoothness and roughness of the paper. The different qualities of each paper I used to make this particular art.

Paper cutting is an art form that possibly dates back to the invention of paper itself in China around 2,000 years ago. Since then, many cultures have developed their own unique styles. Special correspondent Cat Wise visited an artist whose paper cutting reflects the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest and the lives of those who live there. It's part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Paper cutting is an art form that is believed to date back to the invention of paper itself in China around 2,000 years ago. Since then, many cultures around the world have developed their own unique styles.

Every morning, artist and author Nikki McClure takes a long walk in the woods surrounding her home in Olympia, Washington. She feeds the birds and wildlife that dwell here, and spends some time on the beach just steps from her front door. Inspiration for her art is everywhere.

McClure begins with a sketch, which she transfers to black paper, and then begins to work her magic with her knife. Cut by tiny cut for nearly 30 years, McClure has revealed the world she sees and the creatures in it.

She also sells her original paper cut art, prints, and a yearly calendar. McClure's deep connection to nature and her surroundings can be traced to her early years in Olympia, when she studied natural history at the Evergreen State College.

I just kept drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing every stick, every leaf, every insect, every bird. It focused and trained my eye to see details, and then trained my hand to draw those details.

This was this one morning where I was swimming, and I had my arms in front of me. The way that the water was making my arms was that they were all squiggled. They were no longer solid, even though I knew they were solid.

It is such a remarkable gift to participate in this life as it developed and formed and grew and started asking questions like, "Mama, is it summer yet? Mama, is it summer yet? Not yet little one, but the buds are swelling. Soon, new leaves will unfold. Mama, is it summer yet? Not yet, little one, but the squirrel is building her nest. Soon, her babies will be born."

Nikki: I take a piece of black paper and draw on it with pencil with the picture that I want to appear. I then take an x-acto blade and start cutting. I do the part that I worry over the most FIRST, that way I get my mistakes and fears over with right away and can then enjoy the process and experiment. It takes about a week to cut a detailed picture.

Nikki: I try to work every day, but not all days are drawing days or cutting days. Those I have to parcel out to keep my arm happy. But deciding on dinner, raking leaves, sweeping the floor, reading thousands of kid books with my son luckily all count as creative work. So I make every day.

Deep Space Sparkle offers art lesson plans and teaching resources that will help you teach art to kids, even if you aren't a great artist.

You collect the supplies, round up the artists and watch the creativity unfold.

While experiences of disability in the LIS profession are not uncommon, they are rarely spoken about. To address this gap, I am using autoethnography, a form of academic storytelling that draws on and analyses my own lived experience in relation to my LIS work and the LIS profession more broadly. I ask: how does my identity interact with and influence the work I do as a librarian? This question follows the autoethnographic methodology of this paper, acknowledging the significance of my own positionality (and the need to acknowledge lived experience) in addressing this question.

To unpack this question, I must explore what it means to be disabled. Disability has many legal, medical, and socio-political definitions, but in this paper, I will not limit the discussion to any one definition of disability. I take a broad approach, including physical disabilities, chronic illnesses, mental health conditions and neurodivergence. Although there is no single definition of disability, it is important to note the different models and theories of disability and how they shape the experiences of disabled people in the LIS profession. There are five models or theories of disability that I will introduce that are relevant to my own experiences:

The autoethnographic work in this paper is grounded in the social, biopsychosocial, critical, and social justice models of disability. Although I sometimes relate to the social model of disability, in that society disables me, I also have the view that I am disabled because my body is disabling me. There is a liminality between the way society disabled me and the limitations of my own disability. My disability informs the way I perceive and interact with the world and influences the way society interacts with me. However, it is vital to note that my experiences come with the privilege of whiteness and cisgenderness. I am a cisgender, white disabled woman. I have not experienced the types of biases that affect those of marginalised backgrounds related to race, cultural background, and sexual orientation within the LIS profession.

I was born severely myopic and have never known anything different. As such, my experience in the workforce has always been impacted by vision loss. In 2006, I had a retinal detachment (a common comorbidity of Stickler Syndrome) and since then have consequently experienced varying degrees of vision loss and blindness.

Every task and situation requires thought and strategy. For example, if I attend a workshop, choosing the right seat is crucial. I must think about positioning myself so that I can not only best hear the speaker, but also be able to keep up with discussions that move around the room. This is a daily occurrence, in work and life.

There is also a stereotype that speaking louder helps D/deaf or hard of hearing people. This is a myth. Shouting makes words less clear, so I encourage people to speak normally. If meaning is getting lost, try reframing it in a different way rather than repeating the same words over and over. In society, the onus is always on the disabled person to conform to abled communication methods. Communication is a two-way street. However, for me, a lot of the time, it feels like a one-way street with no through road. The 2021 Australian census revealed that 16,000 Australians use Auslan to communicate (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). Auslan, or Australian sign language, is its own language with its own grammatical structure, different from spoken or written English. McQuigg (2003) questions how many can use their first and only language in libraries. Further, they question not only the disability exclusion and ableism the Deaf community faces but also how sign language is a linguistic minority in Australian libraries (McQuigg, 2003). Inclusion is a core value of the LIS profession (ALIA, 2018) but if we want to put inclusion into action, we need to stop expecting D/deaf and hard of hearing people to conform to abled communication methods and make sense of half-heard sentences and lip-reading. LIS workers need to reflect on their own communication strategies and learn basic sign language.

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