What might paper communicate before a word is written on it? Grace Shieh treats handmade paper as both material and narrator, bringing papermaking into conversation with poetry and experimental writing. Fibre, texture, water and form become carriers of memory, asking how reading might happen materially, slowly and beyond the conventional page.

Traditionally understood as a surface for recording and preserving information, paper becomes an expressive medium in its own right. Rather than functioning simply as a passive carrier of text, it holds traces of the gestures, materials and processes through which it is created. Each sheet becomes a site of communication, where the material itself contributes to what can be remembered, expressed and understood.

Drawing on the physical and sensory qualities of papermaking, the work brings together the processes of transforming fibres into pulp, shaping sheets and working with water, texture and form. These acts of making become a language of their own, allowing memory and personal experience to be expressed through material qualities that may resist conventional written description.

Featured as an arrangement of handmade paper works, A Library of Paper Memories invites visitors to consider the relationship between reading and looking, and between language and touch. Reading becomes an act of attention to the material itself, where texture, fragility and the traces of making communicate what words alone may not. The idea of a library is reconsidered as a collection of material experiences rather than simply an archive of written knowledge, with each work holding traces of making and memory.

Presented as part of In Other Words, the installation questions whether materials themselves can function as forms of writing, inviting audiences to encounter memory as something that can be felt, observed and materially expressed.

About Grace Shieh
Grace Shieh is a visual artist, poet and musician working between the United Arab Emirates, the United States and Taiwan. Her multidisciplinary practice spans hybrid poetry, experimental book art and papermaking, exploring the intersections of visual, tactile, textual and auditory forms.

Her work examines how language and meaning move between different sensory and material forms, bringing together poetry, material experimentation and installation. Drawing on diasporic experience, she explores memory, identity and personal and collective histories. Her research focuses on multimodal writing, investigating how touch, image, sound and material can become forms of expression beyond traditional narrative structures.