P A P E R

Paper is a fragile thing—easily torn, quick to burn, and, if not

protected, ephemeral. But even in the digital age, it is a material

that still holds a certain tactile power. As a magazine staff

committed to creating a beautiful print product, we at Oklahoma

Today have a deep respect for finely pressed wood pulp, as do these

six Oklahomans—sculptors, painters, and a bookbinder—who are

creating unexpected gifts just in time for the holidays. 

B y K A R L I E T I P T O N

P h o t o g r a p h y b y J O H N J E R N I G A N

V I E W

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Right, detail from Amanda Bradway’s mixed media piece Re-entry.

Amy Gibson used about 230 tubes of rolled-up magazine pages to create this Oklahoma wall art, which comes in small, medium (shown), and large sizes. She will make any state or country shape by custom order.

O N A R O L LUsing old magazines, Amy Gibson

creates eco- and eye-friendly décor.

A FINE DUSTING of paper confetti covers nearly every surface in Amy Gibson’s home office, the chemical bouquet of glues an unobtrusive but noticeable presence. 

“It’s a little messy, but that’s how I like it,” Gibson says.

While working in a Seattle architec-ture firm, Gibson’s life was all geom-etry and utility. In 2008, she and her best friend, Andrea Read, wanted to exercise their creativity with uncon-ventional materials. 

“The whole thing really started with magazines,” says Gibson.

Using the name Color Story Designs, Gibson and Read began cutting magazines into thousands of quarter-inch strips and organic shapes. They transformed the strips into décor items. In one item, they layered pieces behind a white silhouette of a light-house inside a glass shadowbox. In an-other, they rolled and glued the paper to form rows of tiny tubes encircling a mirror. In yet another, they affixed the pieces between a glass gem and a magnetic backing so the color of the paper showed through the front.

Gibson attended high school in Tulsa, and when she moved back last year, she brought the business with her. Her inventory now includes picture frames, vases, chalkboards, clocks, and more—all decorated with recycled magazine paper.

“People want to know where their products come from,” she says. “Each magazine I use is upcycled.”

In addition to being eco-friendly, Gibson’s material guarantees each item is one of a kind.

“I’ll never have the same pages or arrange the paper in the same order,” she says. “And since magazines have

a different thickness, each piece will have a slightly different texture.”

Clean lines, a bit of chaos, and a flash of color: Gibson shares them with customers one rolled-up page at a time.  

Prices for items from Amy Gibson’s Color Story Designs range from $5 for a small magnet set to $800 for a large mirror. etsy.com/shop/colorstorydesigns.

L I F E L I N E SColor Karma is bringing Oklahomans’

inner kids out to play.

WITH THE EXCEPTION of a dozen half-empty glasses of Merlot, the room resembles a kindergarten class. Markers, pens, crayons, brushes, and paints are strewn across a long table as ripples of chatter add to the chaotic atmosphere.

“May I borrow a cornflower blue colored pencil?” someone asks her neighbor. “I need to get the shading on this bird’s wing just right.”

This is not a group of polite five-year-olds. The people filling in blank prints of horses and rainforests are adults taking Color Karma’s The Art of Coloring workshop.

“At the beginning of every workshop, everyone gets a folder of five images.

They immediately stop listening and start playing with all the materials,” says Irmgard Geul, one of Color Karma’s founders and artists.

In early 2015, Geul, along with her business partner, Norman artist Skip Hill, began hosting coloring parties at a gallery in Pauls Valley. About once a month at wineries, private homes, and retail locations around the state, friends in need of bonding, team-

building professionals, and individu-als looking for a unique way to spend an evening come together in a com-munion of coloring. They use small versions of Geul and Hill’s original prints as their medium.

While the classes are their own kind of inspiration, personal time with a poster-sized Color Karma print gives harried individuals a chance to escape the daily grind.

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At Color Karma workshops, participants sip wine and color prints featuring drawings by hosts and artists Irmgard Geul and Skip Hill.

Catherine Sauer’s elegant handmade journals are constructed with 128 pages of paper thick enough that felt tip markers and heavy inks don’t bleed through, making them ideal for art journaling.

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between the cream-colored pages, ideal for those who want to do more than write.

“Art journals might incorporate stickers, drawings, memorabilia, tickets, or flowers,” Sauer says. “It’s like scrapbooking, but without all the pre-made elements. In a machine-made notebook, you’re not going to have room for all those add-ins.”

As the name of her online store suggests, Sauer hopes the effort she pours into these creations inspires her customers to put pen to paper.

“There’s a really special feeling you get at the beginning of a blank page of a new journal,” Sauer says. 

 Catherine Sauer’s handmade Chapter Three Paperie journals are $30. etsy.com/shop/chapterthreepaperie.

TAKING FLIGHTIn Amanda Bradway’s mixed-media

sculptures, paper cuts right to the point.

LIFE AND DEATH, roughness and beauty, trauma and healing: For Okla-homa City artist Amanda Bradway, forging a path through the duality of life begins with a daub of glue and a single piece of paper.

For years, Bradway worked on her mixed-media sculptures, paintings, installations, clothing, and jewelry whenever she could, stopping to jump

“Coloring is good for parties, but it’s also good for meditation by your-self,” Hill says. “So if in the afternoon or the middle of the night you want to have a quiet moment of coloring, you can do that.”

The Art of Coloring’s 18-by-24-inch Color Karma prints sell for $49.95. The Art of Coloring classes are $35 per person, which includes five small prints, art supplies, and snacks. To place orders or sign up for workshops, email Irmgard Geul at irmartanddesign@gmail.com.

FOR THE RECORDWriting is a thing of beauty on the

inside and outside of Catherine Sauer’s hand-stitched journals.

FOR CATHERINE SAUER, the scratch of a pen on a smooth, blank page marks both an ending and a be-ginning. In 2013, the Indiana native was uprooted to Lawton when her husband was stationed at Fort Sill. In a new state, Sauer decided to pursue a novel creative outlet.  

“I’ve always been in love with beau-tiful things to write in,” she says.

Armed with Internet tutorials and supplies from the craft store where she worked, Sauer learned the intricate process of making her own journals and started Chapter Three Paperie. The business’ name is inspired by the lyrics to a song bibliophile Belle sings in the Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast.

In a process that takes five to six hours in its entirety, Sauer folds heavy card stock in two, sews pages together with waxy thread, glues them to the cover, and affixes a shift of iridescent brocade cloth to give the notebook an elegant finish.

Thanks to her method of hand stitching, a tiny bit of space remains

up from behind the counter of her Plaza District store, DNA Galleries, to help customers. Since 2011, at a desk in her Oklahoma City studio, Bradway has cut thousands of one-inch, teardrop-shaped scales from sheets of metallic paper. Depending on her current inspiration, the scales might become feathers that form the delicate symmetry of a mandala or be arranged in a triangle on top of a buffalo skull, creating a geometrical crown of sorts.

In the sixteen-inch sculpture Ducks vs. Swans, the namesake waterfowl are soft and ethereal, covered in smooth, shimmering paper and metal feathers, their bony, gilded skulls protruding from long necks as they swim in a pond of jagged quartz crystal.

“I love how the materials work together to form interesting textures,” Bradway says.

The combination of paper, skulls, crystals, and metal is startling, but the beauty of her work lies in its otherness.  

“We all share this common human-ity based on struggle, on being afraid that we don’t belong,” she says. “In so-ciety, we aren’t very open to discussing how we transform pain into something beautiful and inspiring. I want to start a conversation.”

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Amanda Bradway creates affordable jewelry and clothing starting at $15 as well as one-of-a-kind luxury works. Ducks vs. Swans, $4,500. For in-formation, prices, and other products, contact the artist at byamandabrad-way@gmail.com or amandabradway.com. DNA Galleries, 1709 Northwest Sixteenth Street in Oklahoma City, (405) 525-3499 or dnagalleries.com.

A C U T A B O V E     Kelly Campbell Berry’s book

sculptures bring new depth to classic stories.

MANY WOULD CONSIDER what Kelly Campbell Berry does in her shadowy home office sacrilege. With the precision of a surgeon and a scalpel to match, Berry extracts Frankenstein’s monster, the Cheshire Cat, and other classic characters from their literary homes. But she is no butcher. The thousands of paper scraps littering Berry’s floor signify a profound respect for the written and illustrated word.

After fire destroyed Berry’s Bethel Acres home in 2006, she began replacing what was lost, including her beloved book collection.

“When I would buy a new book, I would get excited, unwrap it, look at the beautiful illustrations, and then stick it on a shelf,” Berry says. “I wondered if there was a better way to enjoy them.”

In an effort to salvage what she could of a charred book of fables, Berry began removing as many of the pages’ brittle drawings as possible.

“I wanted to recreate how the book’s images interacted with each other, so I started to puzzle-piece them together to form a sort of book autopsy,” she says.

Berry has since sculpted hundreds of graphic novels, illustrations, com-ics, children’s books, and textbooks. From The Walking Dead, where three-dimensional zombies reach for the living beyond their twelve-by-sixteen-inch glass frame, to The Secret Garden, with layers of trees and flow-ers inside Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic, Berry’s book sculptures are on display in homes and offices around the world. In March 2016, a Budapest gallery will feature her arrangement of the hellscape depicted in an antique Italian edition of Dante’s Inferno.

Far from destroying hell or Won-derland, Berry’s book sculptures elevate literature into something that jumps off the page. 

Kelly Campbell Berry’s book and illus-tration sculptures range from $60 to $400 depending on size and complex-ity. kellycampbellberry.com.

Kelly Campbell Berry often uses two copies of the same title to create her book sculptures. This Peter Pan picture book piece took about fifteen hours to make.

The book Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés helped inspire Amanda Bradway’s sculpture Ducks vs. Swans.