Somehow I have to rein in my excitement about the World Washi Summit. And so I’ve decided to write a 3-month blog leading up to the event. This will make everyone around me happy as they too can tune in without having to listen to the gasps, sighs, whoopees and incessant play-by-plays as it all unfolds. This Summit, after a year’s planning, has me so engaged, so energized, so waking up at night with ideas (and questions), and so blown away by the interest of so many that I have to write it down, and share with whoever will listen the evolution of the project.

Japanese papermaker Akari Osaki and Inuit artist Kavavaow Mannomee share a moment at Cape Dorset.

For example, on Friday an email from Pat at Feheley Fine Art, Toronto’s prominent gallery for Inuit art, arrived. They agreed some time ago to be a host gallery, showing work on washi during the Summit. The excellent news was that she had managed to get funding to bring the talented Inuit printmaker Kavavaow Mannomee to Toronto for that week. At the Feheley gallery he will demonstrate the techniques of this unique medium brought to Canada’s Arctic about 60 years ago. Not just that, but he’ll be able to see what other artists around the world are doing with washi as he visits other galleries. Perhaps he, like other artists attending, will be inspired to work with new ideas or techniques.

Now, we need to find a way to also bring down the lively Jimmy Manning, the printshop manager at Cape Dorset who can translate from Inuktitut for Kavavow. He has been our paper contact for 20 years in Nunavut. I have a few ideas to explore this week around that.

Also on Friday, an email confirmed that Barbara Bunke, author, designer, and owner of Ljunggrens in Stockholm, voted the best paper store in Europe, would come and teach a workshop on stamp carving and printing on washi and take part in the Washi Bazaar at the Gladstone Hotel.

Sigrid Blohm, my wonderful right hand in this plan, arrived at work on Friday with glowing reports of prints she had seen the night before at an opening at Open Studio by Emma Nishimura, lithography on gampi tissue. The upper half of the prints were crumpled, giving a lustrous relief texture to the horizon while the lower imagery remained flat and sleek. Immediately we began to think where this work too could be shown in June. Emma is young, but clearly “gets” the special qualities of gampi and uses them to intensify her creative voice. Just the kind of work we want others to see.

On Friday too, the phrase, a “Washi Tea Party” was coined by Open Studio, to describe the hour-long visit that the 3 Japanese papermakers will make to this renowned printmaking co-op. During this time, the makers will meet some of the many printmakers who belong to the studio, see the exhibition of linocuts by Lisa Levitt, works on washi by other artists and watch whatever printmaking is happening in the studio that afternoon. It is this kind of face-to-face meeting across the cultures that holds such potential for mutual inspiration and for truly making a difference.

In 2004, with the help of our long-time and valuable supplier, the Moriki family, we brought over the Osaki family, 3 generations of papermakers working together. Takao Moriki just sent over the current issue of Universal Design, a glossy impressive Japanese magazine devoted to handcrafts. In this issue an article on the Osakis says the following of their young (now 27) daughter Akari:

Akari had always had in mind that she wanted to get away and work outside the village back then, but meeting a Canadian woman Nancy Jacobi-san has made her confident and proud of what she and her family had been doing.

What an unexpected thrill to read this – our hope of course, never quite articulated, in this kind of project, magnified many times by the larger scale of the World Washi Summit.

So that was one day in the life of the preparations for the Summit.

Next, may I introduce the pair in Japan who have been working hard across the Pacific, to apply (successfully!) to the Japan Foundation for funding of the airfare to make the project possible. Paul Denhoed and his wife Maki Yamashita are the liaisons with the 3 selected papermakers and we’ll tell you more about them all in the next segment.