David Joo
Artist Exchange, SOUP Grantee
David Joo is a papermaker and paper artist interested in the material’s expressive potential. Through a combination of papermaking, folding, printing, and painting, the ordinary material of paper is transformed into something vital and imbued with new value. Paper also happens to be rich in content and context. An ancient invention with a lineage that spans different cultural traditions, paper is a technology that is vegetable in origin and plays with our categories of the natural and the artificial. It is a technology with a history of recording history with creative potential bound in how its material properties lend to its ability to transmit our immaterial ideas. This kind of double focus has always appealed to David. Paper becomes a basic metaphorical unit, be it a metaphor for cultural heritage, as a relation between nature and artifice, or as a physical stand-in for conscious thought.
Instagram: @davidajoo
Bio courtesy of the artist.
David won the Fall 2019 Charlottesville SOUP grant to lead papermaking mindfulness workshops at the McGuffey Art Center.
