My work is rooted in an aspiration to practice marbling techniques at the highest skill level, combined with a devotion to beauty, surprise, and feeling through color and form.

Paper marbling is a form of self-expression that is non-representational¹ yet references patterns that are observable in the universe from the microscopic level to the greatest scales of space. Marbling puts us in touch with these universal patterns. It also provides, like much great art, an armature for color and form, which are in turn a space where it is possible to encode feeling, meaning, time, and touch. My work is the meeting place between the craft of paper marbling and an artistic practice (which includes collage and oil painting) that strives for this encoding of meaning into color, pattern, and form.

From Your Body to the Cosmos is the zine complement to Shell Pattern Necklace, published in an edition of 300 by Small Editions. Title taken from philosopher Laura U. Marks, used with permission and gratitude. 

Honored to be included in Pattern and Flow: A Golden Age of American Decorative Paper 1960s–2000s, by Mindell Dubansky, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art Watson Library and distributed by Yale University Press. If you are interested in paper marbling, this will be a defining text on the subject! You can order a copy here.

I am included in BOOKS: Art, Craft and Community, published by the London Centre for Book Arts. Buy online through LCBA or at your favorite bookshop. 

I am continuing to teach Suminagashi classes online with the Center for Book Arts. Please visit the CBA site for upcoming class schedules.  

I am now teaching in person classes in acrylic marbling and Suminagashi again at the 92Y. View the current class schedule here.

Suminagashi is the oldest form of marbling, which originated in Japan in the 12th century. My suminagashi marbling is heavily indebted to and inspired by late 19th to early 20th century Kyoto suminagashi master Tokutaru Yagi’s text, Suminagashi-zome, which was translated to English and published by Heyeck Press in the 1990s. Most of my marbling is done on handmade Japanese paper (called washi), especially sekishu papers made by Osamu Hamada and So Kubota.

I am always trying to learn about current practitioners of suminagashi in Japan. If you are one or know of anyone, please send me an email.

Sheryl Oppenheim was born in 1983, raised in Orlando, Florida, and now lives in New York City. She is a paper marbler and maker of illegible books, an idea she first became interested in after seeing the work of Bruno Munari, and through her proximity to books, bookbinders, and marbled paper at her first job in New York, at a bookbinding supply house. She began marbling paper in 2011, and began learning suminagashi in 2016.

Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library, the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art Library, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among others. Her artist books are available through Small Editions, her friends and frequent collaborators.

Do you know the great thing about a public collection? It is your collection. This link will take you to World Cat, where you can find one of my books in a library (hopefully) near you.