Events

Lynn says of her work:

In my studio practice I instinctively am on a mission without a prescribed outcome. A sense there is something to solve, often without formal definition or materiality, stems from an impetus that, itself, can be very specific.

Sometimes I am held in the orbit of a place or an experience—the narrative of a site, awareness of a phenomenon or a moment—and then my hands and materials move together towards an allusion to this captivating thing, via the inexactitude of memory and the full range of bodily senses.  Often I become transfixed or stymied by a certain scientific phenomenon, because the mutable sciences of geology, anthropology, and physics guide my lifelong and pervasive curiosity—about time, human perception, evolutionary development; and about the capacity for change in humans and in our universes. In my research I internalize what I observe or uncover or cannot comprehend, through my own nature interpreting the sciences in my work. 

I am in my preferred place when I am in an unhurried, physical process of making. I constantly draw, I beat and pigment my paper pulp, I print my own prints—It is all part of the methodology of understanding something about my place in the complex and tantalizing world that I think about all the time. A vivid connection with the many different materials I use, as well as with the concepts that vie for space in my practice, root me in my work.

Lynn Sures creates multi-media works examining the juncture of geology, physics and the origins of humans. She has been a SARF Fellow in Kenya and a US State Department American Artist Abroad in Sri Lanka. Residencies include Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades, Spain; and the Press at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, NM. Exhibitions include the American University Museum, DC; and Isik University Gallery, Istanbul. Collections include the US Dept. of State; US Library of Congress; Yale University; Schomburg Collection at NY Public Library; Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum; Museo della Carta e della Filigrana, Fabriano, Italy; Museum of Art & Photography-MAP, Bangalore, India; and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt. Sures is co-author of Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp, published by The Legacy Press in 2024 and winner of the 2025 Eric Hoffer Award in the category of Art. She was Hand Papermaking guest editor, Winter 2016, on papermaking of Italy; and President of the North American Hand Papermakers, 2018–2020. Sures is Professor Emerita, Corcoran College of Art & Design (GWU), DC.

Find out more about Lynn Sures’ workshop Using Colored Pulp for Editioning and for Floating-Mould Painting