Kati Texas: On "Studio Space," Annette Makino incorporates ephemera into her collages along with haiku that she composes herself.

Lori Goodman uses twigs, twine, and paper to creates structures, both large and small.

Explore Northern California's dynamic art community with "Studio Space."

♪♪♪ Rose Nhem: Hi, I'm Rose Nhem.

Today we're visiting with Annette Makino.

Annette became known in the art community for her expressive watercolor haigas, a visual practice that would later evolve into collage.

Join us as we learn more about her journey as an artist.

♪♪♪ Annette Makino: I feel like every day in the studio you're learning about yourself.

You're kind of inventing yourself as you go along, as you're creating the piece.

It's usually a surprise what comes out.

You don't quite know where it's going, you might have a vision, but ultimately the colors, the compositions, the textures, the shapes, in terms of collage what you end up including, it's a bit of a surprise to the artist as well as anybody else.

Rose: Annette, thank you so much for allowing us into your home, inviting us in to learn more about your journey.

Annette: Thanks for having me on the show.

Rose: What was your life like before doing watercolors?

Annette: Well, I grew up in a creative household.

We were always encouraged to make art.

It was just sort of part of what we did, is draw and quilt and do batik and clay and paint and, you know, everything you can think of.

And then however I ended up going off to college and doing a major in international relations, spent a long career in communications and international development, traveling around the world and helping support independent media and trying to communicate what we were doing and why it was important.

And I also worked doing research on accidental or unintentional nuclear war.

This is in the '80s during the Cold War.

And so it was very far away from the art world.

And then I sort of came to the end of that phase of life and realized I didn't actually want or need to go out and get another "job" job.

And so with that freedom, I just started thinking about what else I wanted to do and sort of floating and I was doing consulting at the time so that was sort of tiding me over.

I had my first show in 2011 and it was a--there were actually two parts to it.

One was a whole collection of haigas about dogs, sort of humorous, senryu with very simple, sumi ink paintings of dogs in various funny situations.

Senryu are a kind of Japanese poem very similar to haiku, but they're a little bit more humorous.

They focus on human nature instead of nature nature.

And then the whole other part of the show was everything else in life and a little bit more on the philosophical side.

Tons of people came to the shows, was in Old Town, Eureka, at the former Old Town Jewelers.

And so I did feel like, "Ah, I think I'm an artist now."

Rose: Okay.

Wow, and it--this all sounds interesting.

Could we take a look at your studio and see where the work come from?

Annette: Absolutely.

Rose: Oh wow.

Annette: And that's just the space.

Rose: I love the spiral staircase here.

Rose: So what do we have here?

Annette: So I'm working on this collage.

This is a female belted kingfisher and I need to add some branches.

I believe this is, yes, a little of Virginia Woolf here.

I have some junk mail, I have some choir music.

I have a canceled check to Makino Studios, a little airmail envelope, and I wanna add some branches down here.

And so this is some of the paper that I painted and I'm just gonna tear it.

I'll try to get this going.

Here we go.

Rose: Do you have a haiku for this piece?

Annette: Yes.

I'm not totally sure if I've finished it but let me think of how it goes.

"The song of the creek tumbling over stones, a flash of kingfisher."

Rose: Very nice.

Annette: May or may not stay that way but that's what I've got right now.

Rose: Oh, that's something that I haven't really thought about when it came to your collage that you mostly just use your hands for all of the pieces of paper.

Annette: Mm-hm, yeah, it's very tactile.

I've always actually loved paper.

Is that gonna work?

A little further, I think.

And I mainly like to do images from nature.

I don't do that many interior pieces and so it seems just very appropriate that the materials themselves are organic.

Rose: It also seems to work because in nature there's no fine lines.

Annette: Yeah, there's no straight lines in nature, right?

Rose: Right.

Annette: Yeah.

Rose: I mean, there can be, but it's not very common.

Annette: Yeah, oh, you know what?

See, this is classic.

I thought I was--this has kind of came out upside down from how I meant it.

So, I was gonna curve it this way but this is actually normally the back of the piece.

And now I have to decide: should I go with the side I wanted or the angle I wanted.

This is an example of, like, how the piece, you know, can have its own little story of its own.

I've decided I'm gonna make it go the side I want and at a different angle from what I planned.

But with one coming up.

So, luckily, I'm the boss.

Rose: The benefit of working for yourself.

Annette: Yes, and the fun part--well, this is sort of fun too but it can also be a little bit, like, crazy-making if you're--'cause you're dealing with all these fluttering pieces of papers and don't know what to do.

Now the fun part is when you, like, get to glue it all down and have it completed.

Okay, let's see how this branch turned out.

It's a little bit chunky in places.

I think I need to trim this down.

Okay, so now I'm pretty happy with that.

So I have my archival glue here.

I'm actually gonna mark with a pencil where I want my piece to end up, 'cause once it's dripping with glue, you can't really maneuver very much.

So I'm gonna go there and this one is gonna go there.

So, okay, upside down.

So, yeah, I've been very fortunate to have a really nice studio.

C'mon, little guy.

Okay, so that's pretty good.

And then this one.

I've got a little window of time to change things.

Okay, that's getting better.

All right.

♪♪♪ Annette: Okay, so this, I think, is good.

Rose: Thank you, Annette.

This looks amazing.

I really appreciate you taking the time to show us your process.

Annette: Yes, thank you so much.

It's always fun to share it.

Rose: So what made you decide to evolve from watercolors to collage and paper work?

Annette: The watercolor has been really fun and interesting for a long time, and I've evolved and developed through the ten years that I did that.

I've kind of developed my own style of combining some traditional watercolor techniques with Japanese sumi ink techniques and I've been inspired by the tradition of Japanese woodblock prints where you have, just because of technically the way that the color was printed, you have thin outlines of black encasing blocks of color, and so that was really fun to develop that style.

And to convey a lot of the beauty of our natural surroundings in Humboldt County.

I do a lot of landscapes, but about a year and a half ago I started to get excited about doing the Japanese-inspired collage.

With the pandemic, my business really slowed down so, silver lining, more time and a chance to really explore that more deeply.

Rose: Where do you find your inspiration?

Annette: Inspiration is everywhere, honestly.

In Humboldt County, we're so lucky to have all these incredible natural landscapes and such a diversity of landscapes in a small area.

So I've painted various of our beaches many times, in fog, in sun, up close, distant, with seagulls, without, you know?

Just that alone, and then the forests and the rivers and the pastureland in the bottoms, the marsh.

I mean, there's just like so many beautiful places.

You know, there's this mystique that artists are born, and people say, "Oh, you're so talented.

I can't draw a straight line."

And I just always wanna say, "This is a skill like anything else."

I mean, some people might have more aptitude towards it, like some people inherently are gonna be better at being a mechanic.

I would be terrible as a mechanic.

But I trust that I could learn to be decent if I put in the time, and I think that anyone can do that and they can start at any age.

My mother is an artist and she took up sculpture at age 80 and she's still going.

She turned 93 a few days ago and she's still making clay sculpture and really getting a lot of satisfaction out of that.

Rose: Great.

I remember reading on your blog on makinostudios.com as you and your mother and was it your sister that also had an art opening or art show together?

Annette: Yes, yeah, I have two sisters and they're both artistic.

And one is an artist and teaches art to middle and high schoolers.

And the other is a filmmaker and teaches filmmaking at the University of Arizona.

But yeah, so my mother and one of my sisters and I had a art show together in Ukiah a few years back.

I think it was called "Paper, Clay, Straw," because of all of our different mediums.

Rose: Oh, great.

Annette: And that was really fun to have a mother-daughter show.

Rose: Well, Annette, thank you so much for allowing us here in your space.

Annette: Thank you, it was really fun.

Rose: And thank you for joining us on "Studio Space."

♪♪♪ Kati: Lori Goodman is a sculptor who explores the world through organic shapes and materials.

She's invited us here to her enchanted farm in Humboldt County to show us how she does it.

Hi, I'm Kati Texas.

Welcome to "Studio Space."

Lori Goodman: I feel a kinship to everybody who's ever made paper or who's ever woven a piece of cloth.

You know, there's this connection.

♪♪♪ Kati: Hi, Lori Goodman.

Thank you so much for having us.

Lori: Thank you for coming.

Kati: Would you describe what it is that you do?

Lori: My medium is paper, so I'm a paper maker.

Kati: Did you go to school for art?

Lori: Ultimately, I did.

I got a master's in art at Humboldt before they closed the program down, and I went there, again, because my family was here and I didn't want to commute to faraway places and I didn't want to leave them, so I--and I wasn't too interested in teaching.

I just wanted the focus.

I went to the sculpture department and I said, "Here's what I want to do."

And they said, "None of that women's stuff.

None of that weaving stuff."

Kati: Wait, "None of that women's stuff, none of that weaving stuff"?

Lori: They didn't want me to--they didn't want my medium, my fiber medium, to be weaving, 'cause they knew I was a weaver.

And I said, "No, I want it to be in paper."

Kati: 'Cause it's not fine arts enough?

Lori: Right.

Kati: Gotcha.

Lori: But they changed their tune after a while.

They were very supportive and it was a great experience.

I'd done a lot of traveling to the southern hemispheres and I'm always fascinated by people who can make do with what's around them 'cause I find it amazing that you can do--you can make anything that we have and people have been making it for centuries and centuries.

And I just love--I love that concept and I love learning about it.

And then I kind of take that into my own work.

Kati: How so?

Can you give me an example?

Lori: Well, just by the materials I use and the shapes that I make, and I always--I have made a lot of dwellings.

I seem to make a lot of dwellings, a lot of structures and places to be.

Sometimes they're small and they're just for one person or sometimes they're replicas of something that I think is, you know, interesting.

Kati: Where do you find the materials that you work with?

Lori: Mostly I buy them.

I buy the kozo from somebody who gets it from Japan.

So I use bamboo.

I use a lot of bamboo and most of the bamboo I get locally.

People are always bringing me bamboo.

Kati: People are happy to get rid of bamboo.

Lori: Yes, exactly.

And I use a lot of round reeds that I just buy from a cane supply store.

And I use a lot of skewers.

Kati: Was there a moment when you brought the paper up into the third dimension or was your working with paper always-- Lori: I was always.

Even when I was working flat, I would be rolling it or folding it or--I have a--or collaging it.

I worked with twigs, whatever, you know, clay.

Kati: What are some of the things that you make paper out of?

Lori: Mostly I make paper out of something that's called kozo.

It's a paper mulberry and it's the stuff that they call rice paper, but it's not rice paper.

Kati: And what do you like about it?

Lori: That it's beautiful.

It's fibrous.

That it's very earthlike-looking.

You can tell that it's handmade.

You can tell that it comes from the earth and that it--and it's old.

Kati: Tell me about the process.

Lori: So I actually do a lot of work.

I cook it.

I cook the kozo strands and I beat it to a pulp, and then put it in a vat and then strain it out and onto the sieve.

But at that point, you can do a lot of creative things with it.

You can paint with it, you can make different colors.

You can mold it.

It's almost like clay.

You can do as many things with it as you can do with clay.

Kati: 'Cause you have the fibers and then they're gonna harden, kind of, into shape.

That you can make that shape as thin or as thick as you like.

Lori: Exactly, exactly.

Kati: That's interesting.

"Beating it to a pulp."

It seems like there's got to be a feeling.

Lori: The paper, the beating, is just this rhythm, so it's different and I love it.

It's just a nice rhythmic thing to do.

Making paper is very meditative and calming.

Kati: Well, I would love to see how that works.

Can we go into your studio?

Lori: Sure.

♪♪♪ Kati: This is the bark?

Lori: This is the bark.

It's called a bast fiber.

It's the inner bark of the tree that grows back very quickly so you can grow these trees, I think the maximum is about 5 feet that they grow.

Then you harvest them so it's perfectly great for the environment.

So then, it gets soaked in water for a long time and then it's cooked.

Kati: Oh yeah, it's much softer.

Lori: So I cook it for about three hours with soda ash, with a caustic solution.

Kati: So, I guess it's safe to touch, you're touching it.

Ew, now it's slimy.

Lori: Now it's slimy, and now it gets beat into a pulp.

Okay, so this gets beat and you see all this splatter on the wall?

Kati: Uh-huh.

Lori: That's from this.

Kati: Okay.

What is that?

Lori: Okay, so this is called tororo-aoi and it is traditionally made out of hibiscus roots and what it does--and it's slimy.

And you could use okra, you could use a lot of things.

But this is synthetic that I have purchased and what it does is, it allows the fibers to float.

Without it, you get this big clump.

This is--this particular pulp is very thick.

Kati: Oh, now it's just stuck.

Lori: Yeah.

There it is.

And now you do--it's called couching.

And this just gets laid and gets couched right down here.

♪♪♪ Lori: There you go.

Kati: Okay, let's go see some of your work that's done--that's put together.

Lori: Okay.

Kati: Okay.

[doors creaking] Kati: [laughing] Oh, my goodness.

Wow, this is not what I was expecting inside this barn.

Lori: So this is just a wrapped box that I made.

It's wrapped with--it's actually hemp cord that I got from Vietnam, not here.

Silk threads, pink and red silk threads, and a little home again.

Kati: And the little--may I?

Lori: Sure.

Kati: And the inside, the-- Lori: I like to do this.

I make a lot of spaces that you can--that are mysterious, that you can climb into.

Kati: Can you climb into that?

Lori: I certainly can.

Kati: Okay.

I like how it sits askew.

And then this is the wrapping fibers, rather than paper, but it's still all about those-- Lori: The fiber.

The only--this is paper, handmade paper, inside.

But right, I was funny--I was surprised when I finished this because, hah, there's not much paper on there.

Kati: It surprised you?

Lori: It did.

Kati: It popped out at you.

Is there a secret inside to this one as well?

Lori: Absolutely.

Kati: Oh, and look at all the different textures around the outside.

Lori: So this is one piece of paper with all this stuff in it.

Kati: Oh, I see.

You see the side is one sheet of paper.

Lori: Maybe, I don't know.

Probably I made a great big sheet and tore it apart.

Kati: And then there's the mysterious nest-like inner.

So we've got the nest, we have huts, we have dwellings.

There's definitely that home theme that it's somewhere comfy to be.

Lori: There you go.

And I do love my places, I have to say.

Kati: So what kind of fibers are these here?

Lori: Same, hemp cords and kozo.

Kati: And kozo?

Lori: One of the things I do love about the kozo, it's so transparent but it's so extremely strong.

Kati: It looks very delicate.

Lori: Yeah, but it's not, yeah.

Kati: I'd like to talk about these guys.

Of all the paper you have strung across different kinds of forms, these are the ones to me that look most like lanterns or like lighting.

Lori: How interesting, yeah, they're cheese.

[laughing] Kati: Where did these come from?

Lori: So I was in Bhutan, and in Bhutan they make yak cheese and they make it all around a lot of places, and they string it.

Like, in Mongolia they string it across the gauze in their yurts in long strings this way from inside on the ceilings.

A lot--different places hang yaks cheese to dry.

So I was at a kiosk on the road, on a skinny little road like this, in Bhutan and they had a tall--really, it was really tall, maybe 10 foot, 12 foot tall, pole.

On which were hanging drying yaks cheese or yak cheese that had already dried.

So I took a picture, of course, of the yak cheese hanging at the little outdoor store and I just posted it to my--both of my daughters and one immediately said, "Mom, why do you have a sculpture in Bhutan?"

And the other one said, "Oh my God, it looks just like your work."

And simultaneously I got these two messages, so as soon as I came home, I started making yak cheese.

Kati: Well, they look delicious.

Tell me about--is this one piece?

Lori: Yes.

Kati: This one has--is this woven, the fiber for this?

Just crisscross?

And what do you harden it with?

Lori: Nothing.

Kati: Nothing, it's just the paper?

Lori: Just the paper.

Kati: You're putting that paper wet onto the frame.

Lori: You know, I don't.

I dry the paper and then I use something that's called methylcellulose which a lot of people use.

Then I paint it on and the methylcellulose gives it a little bit more strength.

Kati: So, bamboo, hemp, paper, reeds.

It's all very organic.

Does that appeal to you the fact that your art could just dissolve in the rain?

Lori: It must because it's not important to me once I finish it.

Kati: It's just done.

The process is what's important.

Lori: And the idea, the problem-solving, the whole--yeah.

And if I like it especially, then it's--I would like so much somebody else to enjoy it but I'm not very kind to it once it's finished.

Kati: Thank you so much for showing us around your totally unexpected gallery in a barn.

Lori: Well, thank you for coming.

Kati: I see you're using a lot of organic shapes and organic materials.

I feel like there's a certain amount of chaos in that process and yet it must be deliberate.

Lori: I'm going for the chaos.

I like the chaos, I like the uneasiness of things, sometimes.

And, you know, they're not really uneasy there 'cause they're organic.

And I think that that's what nature is.

Nature isn't a square box, although it's symmetrical and it's beautiful so I kind of do emulate nature and I, no, I do a lot of outdoor things.

I look at a lot of outdoor stuff.

I used to say I backpack and I hike, but I don't backpack much anymore.

But I still hike a lot and I still can't think of any place I'd rather be than in the mountains or at the beach or, you know.

So, like a lot of artists, I think that, you know, when you look at our studios, sometimes I look at pictures of other people's studios.

They have all the same stuff I have.

They have oak galls and rocks and shells and, you know, strange leaves, and-- Kati: Do you have a project that you're thinking of doing?

Anything you're imagining that you haven't gotten started yet?

Lori: Well, I'm always thinking of my field and what I--a few years ago, before COVID, I really had this fantasy of making a sculptured park.

But that got--the logistics of that are overwhelming.

So what I wanna do, I'm gonna work small, really tiny, which is new for me.

I've been doing that since--during COVID and, like, just even before COVID, I said I'm gonna stay home and work small.

And now I'm thinking again about putting things out into the fields.

So I'm not sure what it's gonna be.

Kati: Well, thank you very much, Lori, for inviting us into your lovely home.

Lori: Thank you for coming.

It's been a pleasure.

Kati: And thank you for joining us on "Studio Space."

Rose: Thank you for watching "Studio Space."

For more information about these artists, visit Studiospace.tv.

Annette: Oh, there's this whole world where you can write these poems that are really like pithy and insightful and funny and interesting and, in three lines, can capture some element of human experience.

And you can do art so that the art and the words both sort of enhance each other and deepen the meaning of each.

♪♪♪