September 9, 2026
To live “hand to mouth” is to survive with very little. In a sense, these works do just that--making the most out of humble, scrappy found materials.
Image credit: Joseph Bolstad & Mayuko Kono
The term papier-mâché translates to “chewed paper.” The recent work of Joseph Bolstad and Mayuko Kono draws on this meaning by connecting paper-based materials to ideas of consumption, waste and transformation.
Kono’s sculptures utilize found and thrifted metal racks as armatures to be cut apart, combined and eventually skinned with colorful paper pulp. Hovering somewhere between architecture and biology, they suggest an imagined world made physical through careful and accretive actions, similar to nests built by swallows or insects. Kono’s still-life drawings, executed on handmade paper, depict stacks of common food items which, upon close inspection, reveal themselves to be plastic toys.
Bolstad’s relief sculptures are constructed of carton-pierre, a form of papier-mâché which translates to “stone cardboard.” Made by molding material into disposable remnants of the artist’s own consumer existence, such as plastic bottles and other packaging, these colorfully airbrushed works explore ideas of excess, metamorphosis and the boundaries between the natural and the human-made.
To live “hand to mouth” is to survive with very little, and in a sense, these works do just that, making the most out of humble, scrappy found materials. But what happens when the expression is reversed? For the artists, to live “mouth to hand” means to turn the fraught remnants of consumerism into meaningful expression, transforming the discarded to construct rich, resilient inner worlds.
The artists will conduct a demonstration and workshop on their building processes for students in two classes at Dickinson: the First-Year Seminar Trash Talk: Worlds of Waste and ARTH130 Art & Sustainability. This exhibition and demonstration are supported by the Department of Art & Art History, the Center for Sustainability Education and the Griffith Fund for Humanistic Teaching and Inquiry.
Joseph Bolstad is a Los Angeles-based artist working primarily in sculpture. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at venues such as Secret Location in North Hollywood, Calif., Here Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pa., MINT Gallery in Atlanta, Ga., Dean Jensen Gallery in Milwaukee, Wis., and Zuisho-ji Art Projects in Tokyo. He received an MFA in sculpture from Pennsylvania State University in 2011 and a BFA in sculpture from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2005. His recent work uses historically rooted paper-based processes to explore ideas of containment, mutability and hybridity.
Mayuko Kono, originally from Japan, lives and works in Los Angeles, Calif. Working primarily in sculpture, she explores patterns and systems found in domestic and social landscapes, often through manipulating discarded or outdated commodities. Her work has been shown in various venues in the U.S. and Japan, including the Torrance Art Museum in Torrance, Calif., Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco and Kippomaru in Hiroshima, Japan. She received her MFA from the Pennsylvania State University.
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Further information
- Location: Goodyear Gallery
- Time: 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
- Cost: Free