Jenny Otis Miller: Artist

About My Work

My creative research takes place within the University of Iowa Center for the Book program structure. At UICB, I began with hand lettering and then moved into the art and craft of papermaking. Recently, I have encompassed printmaking, installations with light, map making, and a limited edition alphabet book.

As an artist, I love working with craft based traditions that require collaboration between people and materials. I like getting to know the materials as I work with them through multiple steps of processing, preparing them to become a work of art. For example, I worked with clay and glazes for many years, but more recently I have been creating handmade paper and processing my own fibers.

My finished work often records the movement of materials when they are wet and becoming dry and still. Building with clay, the igneous matter records pressure and shows how it was formed, both visually and through tactile interaction. Shaping clay and recording touch is also a time based process, stages move from wet slurry to bone dry and then fired clay.

With paper making, a similar process happens of material movement and eventually drying into a final shape as time passes. Water is abundant as the fibers are being prepared. Shaping fibers into sheets of paper happens in many ways. For me, a slurry of fibers floating in water can be distributed over a porous surface (a screen and mould); as water releases, the fibers knit together and begin to form the sheet. Gravity pulls droplets of water, leaving a network of interlocking fibers behind. The paper continues to dry through evaporation until a final form is left behind. Sheets of paper can be dimensional or flattened depending on the way they were formed and the way they were dried.

The record of human touch is possible in clay and in paper, but I also like to activate the audience’s sense of touch and movement through surface texture and by creating dynamic folded forms. When I am forming a sheet of paper, I sometimes draw into the loft of wet fiber, creating low-relief drawings. The papers are dimensional, with thin and thick areas that cast shadows in raking light and reveal transparency in the form or watermarks. The final dry form of the paper ultimately becomes a sculptural object with potential to be used in printmaking, installation art, sculpture, books, and more. Many of my thinner drawings have been used to create pressure prints, which then become folded maps. Images of my pressure printed maps are seen on this page.

A bit more about papermaking:

First, I prepare fibers to make a slurry which is poured onto a porous surface. While the sheet is forming, I press into the loft of fiber, making marks that create low relief drawings. My favorite fiber to date has been raw flax, but I experiment all the time.

The nature and amount of fibers used will determine the function of the completed sheet of paper. For example, the thicker sheets are sturdy and are ready to hang once they dry. They function as drawings or as sculptures and many sheets lend themselves to installation work. Lighting decisions will bring out different qualities in my sculptural paper pieces. In contrast, my thinnest paper drawings are useful in my letterpress projects. These thin drawings are ideal for pressure printing projects; I have been making limited edition maps, books, prints, and posters. After I finish printing with these low-relief paper drawings, I can then recycle the fibers into new projects. Images of a map project titled “What We Have Left” are shown on this page. I cut the prints into sections and adhere them to book cloth to make folding maps of places. “What We Have Left” is a map of a remnant oak savanna in Iowa City, upper City Park. The maps are depicting elements of the oak savanna, in the black ink I am illustrating the tree trunks themselves, especially the older trees with knobby burls.