Kathryn & Howard Clark

Howard & Kathryn Clark founded Twinrocker Handmade Paper, a legendary papermaking studio in Brookston, Indiana, in 1971. We talk about how the two of them met in graduate school at Wayne State University in Detroit cleaning silkscreens, (how sweet) and how they were introduced to papermaking by Aris Katroulis, a Tamarind trained printer who was exposed to paper by Laurence Barker, who was also in Detroit teaching at Cranbook. Kathy says she thought there were papermaking studios everywhere, since there were two in Detroit! After Grad school, they moved to San Francisco, where Kathy was the first woman to print at a Tamarind offshoot shop in San Francisco. Howard, who studied mechanical engineering and industrial design started building equipment and Twinrocker was born. Eventually, the couple moved to Brookston, Indiana to a family farm and the business grew over time, creating some of the finest papers in America, collaborating with numerous artists and selling papermaking supplies. Howie tells me how one of their key mentors in developing fine papers (because they were some of the few doing this at the time) was old books and old prints – they learned a lot from the paper in old books. Continue reading Kathryn & Howard Clark