I am a paperhanger/scholar; this seems to call for an explanation, let’s face it.
I earned a two-year degree at a community college majoring in English and then dabbled in medieval English Lit and classical guitar but took formal education no further. After some traveling in the US and Germany I learned paperhanging at a trade school in Vermont at age 27. I worked as an all-around paperhanger for nine years; then I started working in historic homes. Working with paper conservators, academics, and curators introduced me to the problems of preserving and restoring building fabric. This led to reading in the secondary literature at Winterthur and then primary research. I began contributing articles to the journal of the Wallpaper History Society.
I learned that historical households diverged greatly along stylistic, technical, and social lines. These differences raised a question. How can we best match reproduction wallpaper to historic houses? Nor was “replication” itself straightforward. Why do it? Why should something from an old household be reproduced and artificially reinserted into historic fabric? What did it prove?
At a practical level, the installation of reproduction and antique wallpaper has been a craft and a means of employment. The installation was the constant. Slowly it dawned on me that the wallpaper too, despite its ephemeral nature and diversity, was also a constant. Artificiality began to take on a more positive meaning. I wondered how wallpaper began. This led to a monograph about early wallpaper 1650-1750.
As detailed on main page, my current project is a newsletter list-serve which looks at wallpaper as material culture. I begin in France but hope to shift the conversation to developments in America 1800-1875 in due time.