Between book and art object, the treasures of the Laurel Parker Book workshop

[…] A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Center for Book Arts in New York, [Laurel Parker] began her career in Paris and New York as an assistant to artists, for whom she designed her first works, before moving to France in 2003.
The studio she founded in 2008 may bear her name, but it’s a creative partnership that has been working in her luminous space in Romainville (Seine-Saint-Denis), in the inner suburbs of Paris, since Paul Chamard joined her in 2011, after completing an internship. Together, the craftsmen – who are now 56 and 38 years old – make bespoke books, artists’ multiples and cases for rare or fragile works entirely by hand.
Their customers include publishers, photographers, visual artists and gallery owners, as well as museums, libraries and luxury goods houses.

[…] On a wall in their studio float two tender green and pink kimonos, made from rectangles of paper folded, waxed and sewn together. They are the result of a residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, the Japanese cousin of Villa Medici in Rome, where Laurel Parker and Paul Chamard were the 2019 laureates. During their stay, the duo met paper-makers and fell in love with the art of folding and the possibilities of washi, traditional Japanese paper.
‘There are two ways of looking at paper: in France, we see it primarily as a medium for printing, whereas in Japan it is used to partition space, and to make utilitarian objects such as boxes, lanterns, screens, string, toys, etc. We wanted to explore this three-dimensional aspect in our practice’ says Laurel Parker. Aerial panels, geometric origami, Tetra Pak-style boxes: their experiments with washi were presented in 2022 at the Musée de la chasse et de la nature (Paris 4th arrondissement), and more recently at the Parisian gallery Sinople and at the Biennale Émergences in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis). […]