Sheryl Jaffe

Some of my best friends are plants – together we share strength and flexibility, resilience and vulnerability; a need for air, water and light. I make paper and sculpture from plants to find serendipitous connections and to experience my own internal responses to textures, colors, balance and forms. My goal is not only to choreograph a piece in which the materials have a voice, but to encourage them to sing and dance.

Like many people, I feel most at home when I’m surrounded by trees. I find their structure and gestures so full of movement, and their quiet presence, comforting. I’m aware of them breathing. I’m inspired by branches caught in windfall, dried grasses and vegetation in various states of drying and decaying. I am endlessly fascinated by how fibers connect and reconnect, intertwining in new ways, transforming the old into something new.

I want to invite viewers to slow down and “Breathe In” the work. I see viewers as participants, I’d like them to be inspired to question, to think differently about the familiar world around them, and to wonder about the possibilities of transformation. The precarious balance of being human on this earth at this moment is inherent in my work.

All the paper I make in collaboration with plants are cooked and beaten to form the pulps of onion skins, cedar bark, mulberry bark, eel grass, iris leaf, flax, seaweed, bluejeans, cotton and other invasive and locally grown fibers.

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– Sheryl Jaffe, 2025