Just something that I‘ve missed from the year 2011 and crossed my way shortly ago when I was scanning the internet for envelopes as a part of exhibition concepts or artwork: Works of paper by Kouzaki Hiromu, a japanese carpenter who at the age of 80 began to make envelopes from all sorts of paper he found in his house. Fifteen years later he died and his family put paper into his coffin so he would go on producing them. The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin made this wonderful little exhibition about him with the title: Grandfather’s Envelopes.
The envelopes so obviously handmade and what is most remarkable about them, apart from the silent, diligent, and obsessive manner in which they were made, is their wonderful simplicity and humility – qualities that are not much in evidence in our materialistic world.
