Plant to Paper Workshops, with Artist: Meg Heeres

This event will be step one in the papermaking process. Individually with gather at the EIC to collect non-native plants from the surrounding UM-Dearborn campus areas to harvest them for use with papermaking process. This will be all outdoors and may not take the entire timeframe to complete. Please dress in boots and long pants for this event and bring hats, sunscreen and a water bottle. All tools and gloves needed with be provided.

About Project

The Environmental Interpretive Center(EIC) at the University of Michigan- Dearborn and its stakeholders will collaborate with UM Dearborn students and faculty, area schools, and local artist Megan Heeres to create a site specific installation to be displayed at the Center. This installation will be created with handmade paper made from “invasive” or unwanted plants from the UM Dearborn/EIC property and will reflect the community of people working together to make the artwork. 

Bio

Megan Heeres’s art practice and professional endeavors have connected into a cooperative way of working with community both inside and outside of the studio. These collaborations engage with place, people, art and plants. She participates in projects locally in Detroit and nationally, most recently at Xenoform Labs in San Francisco and the Broad Art Lab at Michigan State University. Megan has been an artist-in-residence at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, the Michele Schara Residency, the Ragdale Foundation, the Santa Fe Art Institute and Women’s International Study Center. She is represented by Matéria Gallery in Detroit, Michigan and has works in many private collections.

She graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art with a Master's of Fine Art in 2009 and from the Residential College at the University of Michigan with a Bachelor's of Art in 2002.

This project was made possible by a grant from the Arts Initiative at the University of Michigan awarded to Jacob Napieralski's project title: Reimagining Environmental Stewardship through People, Plants, and Places.

Processing Paper Steps:

1. Plant Materials Collection

2. Process Plants to make Pulp

3. Papermaking