I met Leigh Suggs 10 years ago when she took a sculptural papermaking class with me at The Penland School in North Carolina. We talk about her upbringing with a mom who was an art professor, how she didn’t think she’d ever be an artist, but how her life just kept going in that direction and today she makes a living making paper art. She tells me about the process of applying to grad school and finding the right fit, both in terms of funding and discipline. And of course we chat about her work, which involves optical trickery. She’s interested in getting us to think about how we see and how we use language to describe what we see in her pieces that employ optical trickery. And we discuss a unique ongoing collaboration Leigh has with two women she met during that session 10 years ago at Penland. Continue reading Leigh Suggs