John Babcock

Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp, has won the 2025 Eric Hoffer Book Award in the category of Art.

This exciting new book features some of my work over the years. It is gratifying to see documentation of a movement within the hand papermaking community that specifically talks about a group of international artists who work with pigmented pulp as an art medium.

Radical Paper, from two of America's finest artists working in colored pulp, Lynn Sures and Michelle Samour, introduces and expands this incredibly versatile medium to artists, curators, collectors, art historians, and the broader public through personal and technical essays and full-color images that highlight the dynamic scope and inventiveness of today's leading practitioners.

Although artists have employed handmade papers for centuries, the use of handmade paper and colored paper pulp as an integral element in creating art - as opposed to serving only as the surface on which art is created - has seen remarkable development over the last 70 years. As early practitioners like Douglas Morse Howell, Laurence Barker, and Kenneth Tyler mapped out new directions in using colored paper pulp, their work inspired the careers of generations of artists who have taken this medium in fresh and unexpected directions. This foundational book - the first of its kind - features 73 artist innovators whose work, grounded in the common medium of paper and pulp, takes flight through an array of applications, modalities, and techniques, from the pictorial to the structural, representational to abstract, two- and three-dimensional, spanning the meditative to the mercurial.

"Both historically insightful and visually stunning, this work opens wide the door to this art medium. The authors give attention to significant forebears, allow devoted long-time practitioners to present their work and approaches, and provide important focus on key collaborative studios and their master craftspeople. Hundreds of artworks by scores of artists complement the textual richness. I found much to revel
in and enjoy in these pages."
-Michael Durgin, Co-Founder and former Editor, Hand Papermaking

342 full-color illustrations
Legacy Press

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