By Heidi Trautmann

While we were discussing the result and experiences by our paper artists Inci Kansu, Emel Samioglu and Ismet during the Amateras Festival in Sofia, see article, we also talked about the development and successful march of paper art around the globe.

Working with paper, printed books or any paper material has a strong basis in Korea, China and Japan, where paper making has always been a traditional heritage, has reached all other continents and countries and also in North Cyprus for some years already a group of five paper artists; there is the ‘book-art’ or the ‘altered book’ yearly event organized by Horst Weierstall in Nicosia South but I would not know of any other there.

In Turkey it has taken a strong foothold and it is planned to open a first Paper Art Museum.

There already exists quite an extensive archive of paper art collected and bought and they have asked to donate some works to further fill their halls.

There are events and festivals taking place in France, Ismet was there just a year ago in the IAPMA event Fascination Paper in a church of Le Vigan.  In Germany, there is one just going on in the Museum of Deggendorf : 224 international paper artists from 24 countries have entered and 78 artists from 18 countries were finally chosen, among them Ismet Tatar. It is the biggest event Germany has done on the paper art sector and according to my friend, it is a very important one.

Efforts are made to include this art form in the fine arts faculties ; in North Cyprus the progress will be observed for the moment.

The fascination lies in the endless application and experiments, to find out its possibilities of use in all fields, from fashion to music, arts to architecture. Already in the making of paper, changing, adapting lie hidden boundless ways, just to imagine that paper can be made from tomatoes, as I have seen done by Inci Kansu, or any other plants; that natural binders can be derived from plants such as prickly pear.

We might think that there is not much left to surprise or excite us, but there is, as I am told and as I can see.

If you want to learn more than go to IAPMA or just paper art in the internet, you’ll get plenty of answers.