From the Bench of Nicholas Cladis

Welcome to From the Bench, SFCB’s series of short studio tours with friends near and far. From favorite tools to works in progress, you never know what you’ll learn about from these amazing artists.

This month we’ll chat with papermaker Nicholas Cladis. Nicholas is the papermaking specialist at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, where he lectures and manages the Oakdale paper research facility. Nicholas is an active researcher and practitioner of traditional and non-traditional papermaking processes. For six years he lived and worked in Echizen, Japan — an area with over 1,500 years of papermaking history — and continues to maintain an active relationship with the papermaking community there. Nicholas’ studio work responds to the discipline of papermaking itself, thereby engaging with aesthetics, time, material, movement, and personal narrative. His site-specific installations frequently appear in alternative exhibition spaces such as repurposed storehouses and barns, where the work lives in realms of natural light and shadow.

You can see some of his work at his website, nicholascladis.com