A joint lecture by Radha Pandey and Johan Solberg.

Radha Pandey is a papermaker and letterpress printer. She earned her MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book where she was a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She has studied Western and Asian Papermaking techniques with Timothy Barrett and teaches book arts classes in India and the US.

Her interest in the history of papermaking led her to research creating stop-motion animations using watermarks. Her expertise also includes traditional textile hand-printing in India, and stop-motion animations in paper. Her artists books are held in 37 public collections including the Library of Congress and Yale University.

Her graduate thesis work, titled Anatomia Botanica won the MICA Book Award at the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair in 2014. Currently, Radha is working on a set of artist books about the political history of indigo and madder production.

Johan Solberg, an MFA student in book arts at the University of Iowa, traveled to Uzbekistan on funding from the Graduate College to research the current state of papermaking in the country.

This Norwegian bookbinder visited numerous sites, institutions, and individuals associated with papermaking. While access to some collections of religious, mathematical, scientific, and philosophical texts were limited, other were much more accessible.

Solberg found a pronounced need for more skilled conservation treatment of valuable manuscript materials. He also became convinced of the importance of future research on the much-neglected papermaking and bookbinding traditions of the region.