About

Jamie Capps was born in California and changed her career path midlife, returning to school as a nontraditional student at Mount Holyoke College. She went on to earn an MFA from the University of Iowa Center for the Book, where she specialized in papermaking.

Capps’s work has been exhibited at institutions including Cedar Crest College, the Evanston Art Center, the Morgan Conservatory, the Lyndon House, K.K. Merker Gallery, Public Space One, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Taber Art Gallery, and the Nishino Heritage House in Echizen, Japan.

My work is rooted in papermaking and print as forms of embodied thinking; processes that hold memory, labor, and quiet resistance. Through handmade paper, pulp drawing, printmaking, and book arts, I explore how material can carry emotional weight and narrative without relying on text. Fiber, pressure, repetition, and chance function as collaborators, shaping surfaces that feel simultaneously fragile and insistent.

Much of this work draws from myths, folklore, and imagined creatures that linger at the edge of understanding. Monsters, constellations, and lurking forms become stand-ins for uncertainty, protection, and transformation. Rather than illustrating specific stories, I use these motifs to examine how belief, fear, and care are constructed and passed down. Books and accordion structures allow for time-based viewing, inviting slow encounters and moments of pause, while sculptural paper works extend the page into space.

Handmade processes are central to my practice. I am interested in the intelligence embedded in materials, the way pulp moves, fibers entangle, and paper remembers each action. This physical knowledge resists speed and perfection, offering space to consider labor, vulnerability, and intentionality. In an increasingly automated world, I see print and paper as sites of agency and quiet defiance, where touch and imperfection assert their value.

Ultimately, my work asks how we hold what is difficult, unseen, or unresolved, and how material can act as both shelter and witness.