hazel bank
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current and former tutors
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Claudia Benvestito
Claudia Benvestito has been a book conservator at the Marciana National Library in Venice since 1999. From 1992 to 1995 she trained at the European Course for Conservators/Restorers of Book Materials in Spoleto, Italy. She studied under some of the leading specialists in the field including Christopher Clarkson, Nicholas Pickwoad, Anthony Cains, Tom and Sylvia Albro and Robert Futernick. She then trained at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. under the supervision of Tom Albro. Claudia is especially interested in the physical structure and behaviour of books and bookbindings. She has worked out solutions for the preservation and/or display of her library's archival materials with the main aim of reducing the direct manipulation of each object while respecting its particular shape.
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Benjamin Elbel
Ben has a background in illustration and trained as a bookbinder at the 'Centro del bel libro' in Ascona (Switzerland), and at the bench of various fine bookbinding firms in Germany and England, before setting up his own business in 2012, first in London and since 2015 in Haarlem, Netherlands.
With an inquisitive mind, Ben has a passion for the engineering side of bookbinding, and has developed many original structures and processes which he uses in his practice, and shares with the community via 'Bookbinding out of the box'.
research: www.bookbindingoutofthebox.com
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Sün Evrard
Sün Evrard was born in Hungary and has lived and worked in France since 1971. She studied bookbinding, gold-tooling and book design at L'Ecole de l'Union des Arts Decoratifs, Paris. Since 1978 she has worked as a designer bookbinder. An exhibition of her design bindings was held at the Historical Library of Paris in 1995. Teaching has always been part of her activities, first at the school where she studied then at the Atelier d'Arts Appliqués du Vesinet at Chatou, near Paris.
She considers bookbinding to be a permanent interaction between form and function, an association between design and conservation practice.
sun.evrard.pagesperso-orange.fr/index.htm
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Gabrielle Fox
Gabrielle is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she runs her bookbinding studio. After receiving a diploma in Fine Binding and Conservation in the UK she spent many years working from her own studio in Sussex before returning to Ohio in 1990. She now travels widely to teach and care for collections, most recently to the American Academy of Bookbinding in Colorado. In 2014 she was the Canadian Bookbinders & Book Artists Guild Visiting Artist. Her work is represented in many public and private collections in the US and Great Britain. Gabrielle is the author of The Essential Guide to Making Handmade Books and is currently working on a history of the Larkspur Press.
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Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson has an international reputation for his pioneering work in developing literacy through the book arts. He is author of over fifteen titles including A Book of One's Own, Literacy Through the Book Arts and Pictures and Words Together. Recent teaching tours include Sweden, South Korea and Thailand and he regularly teaches in the USA. He is on the UK Craft Council's select list of British designer-makers.
Dr. Johnson is also a successful book artist with work in the collections of the Tate Gallery, Cooper-Hewett Museum in New York, the National Gallery, the Library of Congress and many Universities including UCLA, Yale and Harvard. His work was selected for the recent Stand and Deliver USA touring exhibition of pop-up edition books and for the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artist Guild's The Art of the Book touring exhibition (2008-09) for which he received the Guild's Book Art Colophon Award.
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Daniel Kelm
Daniel Kelm is a book artist who enjoys expanding the concept of the book. He is known for his innovative structures as well as his traditional work. His expression as an artist emerges from the integration of work in science and the arts and alchemy is a common theme in his book work. He is known for his extensive knowledge of materials.
Before Daniel began his career in the book arts he received formal training in chemistry and taught at the University of Minnesota. Kelm's experience with bookbinding began in 1978 with employment in the first of several production studios where he leaned progressively more specialised traditional techniques. In 1983 he opened his own studio in Easthampton, MA, USA called The Wide Awake Garage where he designs and produces artist's books, interpretive fine bindings and book sculptures. He invented a style of bookbinding called 'wire edge binding' in the mid-1980s in order to explore the nature of the book as articulated sculpture.
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Katinka Keus
Katinka Keus is an experienced Dutch book conservator. Following a career as a costume maker for the theatre she studied bookbinding and conservation which she has been practicing for more than thirty years. Her many clients include national museums and special collections.
Her experience and knowledge of a wide variety of materials has proved a distinguishing feature of her work. She has given demonstrations and courses throughout Europe, including the Society of Bookbinders conference in Bath, Designer Bookbinders in London and the National Library of Estonia. Her bindings are regularly exhibited with Tomorrow's Past.
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Monica Langwe
Monica Langwe lives and works in Sweden. She is deeply rooted in the traditions of her cultural heritage and handicrafts and uses this as inspiration and as a springboard for drawing attention to old techniques. She trained and worked with highly regarded binders in Sweden, Europe and America before setting up her own studio to produce work that is a combination of tradition and new design. Her interest in the past led her to archives in Sweden, Estonia and The Vatican to study every-day, functional books often overlooked because of their apparent simplicity. This research has resulted in a publications about collections in Estonia and The Vatican.
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Rita Lass
Rita Lass was born in Berlin 1979 and now lives in Halle (Saale), Germany. She is a book-artist who creates one-off bindings and decorated papers, as well as artist books and prints. She balances the time spent in solitude in her studio with collaborations that take her out and about. She is an active part of the group hr.fleischer e.V. which owns a corner kiosk that is run as an art-and-project space in Halle. Rita is also part of the artist trio Hentschel, Horn und Lass – Büro für funktionslose Architektonik / agency for inoperable architectonics. And she is also a member of Meister der Einbandkunst (mde-einbandkunst.eu). She considers her collaborations an important part for her personal artistic processes and appreciates how one feeds back to the other. Rita also teaches classes for children and adults. Her fine bindings and artist books can be found in private and public collections.
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Kylin Lee Acherman
Kylin Lee Acherman is an American born hand-bookbinder and craftsperson. Her work focuses on contemporary bookbinding and she uses specific materials and techniques as a launching point for the design and creation of a variety of beautiful and functional objects.
After earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Photography and Cognitive Science, Kylin dedicated eight years working for and leaning from Master Bookbinder Daniel Kelm at The Wide Awake Garage. In 2007 Kylin established her own studio producing small editions of artist books and fine press books. Since moving to Switzerland in 2010 she has launched a new project designing and crafting custom made and limited edition boxes for jewellery, collectables and precious objects.
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Emily Martin
Emily Martin earned an MFA in painting from the University of Iowa in 1979, having previously earned a BFA and MA in art drawing and painting, respectively. She started the Naughty Dog Press in 1996 to produce her own limited editions of primarily sculptural and movable artist's books. During her career she has produced over 35 limited edition books using a variety of production techniques including letter press printing, intaglio printing, silkscreen printing, ink jet printing and photocopies. Martin's books are in public and private collections throughout the United States and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain in London. Martin is very interested in the relation of the book as an art form to the traditional art of bookbinding.
Tine Noreille
Tine Noreille is a Belgian bookbinder and graphic artist. She studied classic bookbinding with additional training in books and paper restoration.
After a seven year education in Graphic Art she became more interested in making modern bindings for her own art work and creative bookbinding in general.
Since then she has been teaching her students bookbinding techniques and stimulating their enthusiasm for working with books and paper, giving them confidence in their own creativity.
It became evident that for modern creative design precision is very important and as result she developed her special cutting and measuring method that she has refined over the last twenty years of teaching.
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Lori Sauer
Lori Sauer was born and educated in the USA and has degrees in Fine Art and English Literature. After moving to the UK she worked for a number of years in publishing before studying bookbinding at The City Lit in London. She has won various awards for her work including the Silver Medal in the Annual UK Bookbinding Competition. Now a Fellow and a former President of Designer Bookbinders, she specialises in contemporary fine binding and continues to do high profile commissions for private presses and bindings for the Booker Prize. For the last decade Lori has turned her attention to the development of alternative binding structures and passes on her knowledge of them through teaching. Her work is held in public and private collections in North America, Africa, Europe and the UK. She is the founder and director of BINDING reDEFINED.
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Rahel Scheufele
Born and educated in Germany, Rahel trained as a bookbinder from 2009 – 2012 and received a Master's degree in hand-bookbinding (Munich) in 2015. She continued her training during workshops with Edgard Claes, Ireen Kranz and others.
Since 2016 she has worked as head of the hand-bookbinding department at Bubu AG (Switzerland), where she responsible for the training of 5 young apprentices. Rahel is a member of the MDE (Meister der Einbandkunst), a german group of professional hand-bookbinders for fine bindings.
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Suzanne Schmollgruber
From May 2010 to December 2022 Suzanne Schmollgruber was the director of the Centro del Bel Libro, in Ascona, Switzerland. Her responsibilities included teaching courses, coordinating guest instructors and overseeing the continuing development of the programme. Thanks to her broad international experiences and contacts she always brought energy to the department of Bookbinding and Design.
Suzanne trained as a hand bookbinder in Switzerland from 1988 until 1992 and from 1992/93 at the CBL under Edwin Heim. Between 1994 and 2007 she continued her training with Hedi Kyle, Sün Evrard, Carmencho Arregui and others. From 1996 to 2005 she ran her own workshop in Barcelona and from 2005 she worked in Milan. She leads the Swiss group of professional bookbinders, Buch and Form.
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Theresa Wedemeyer
Theresa Wedemeyer was born in Germany and trained as a bookbinder from 2008 to 2011. Following the old custom of the Walz, she went on the traditional journeyman years after her apprenticeship to learn more about the diversity of bookbinding in Europe. During these 3 ½ years she worked in different workshops around Europe, including Ireland, France and England. From 2016 to 2019, she completed a design degree and was awarded her master's degree in bookbinding in 2022. In addition to teaching for two design schools and working in a library, she creates fine bindings and limited editions in lead type in her own workshop. She is an active member of the association Meister der Einbandkunst e.V. and has won several prizes with her book objects.
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Nadine Werner
Nadine Werner did her apprenticeship in bookbinding in Hamburg with further education as a handicraft designer at the Craft Academy for Design in Kassel. After working with various bookbinders in New Zealand she opened her own workshop in 2005 as a free-lance book and paper designer. In 2007 Nadine began designing for the publishing company Hartley & Marks, mainly for the brand Paper-oh. She took several courses at the Centro del Bel Libro and after winning the Bel Libro Award in 2009 she began teaching.
Her fields of expertise are adhesive-free binding, e.g. her patented technique of the 'steckalbum', book constructions and magnetic closures.
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Dario Zeruto
Being a mechanical engineer by profession, Dario says he still may still struggle with conceptualising what to do within the parameters of contemporary art and design. He works with paper as an expressive medium, taking the book object as the fundamental reference in any of their meanings whether as a single object or in small editions and installations.
He is self-taught with a special interest in the Bauhaus and the conceptual art of the 60s and 70s. By using geometry as a language, Dario creates work by combining textile techniques, binding and folding paper, using their manual components as a fundamental part of the process. It is precisely the work process which constitutes the means of expression through the repetition of gesture - the mathematical component remains embodied in the works.
Parallel to the art process, Dario has developed didactic work for public and private institutions in Spain, Italy and Switzerland, especially related to the use of the paper fold as an element of creation and design. His approach is always from the commitment to the idea of learning by exploring and the sensitivity to material.
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