Aidan Anne Frierson is an Artist and Educator from Chicago primarily practicing Handmade Papermaking. Her practice prioritizes Cotton, emphatically positing the material as “the reason Why We Are Here”.

Frierson’s work is a contemporary retrospective rooted in living, feeling, autobiography, spirit, and archive. Frierson reflects on both personal and collective relationships with plants, people, love and labor as a reframe for the interconnections of the past, present, in-between and in-beyond.

Through Handmade Papermaking, she activates material by engaging with color, texture, size, pattern and form. She honors history as a material by embedding ephemera in relationship with cellulose. Frierson’s work is a culmination––a form––of material storytelling and diaristic cartography, that reflect memory’s interdependent relationship with reality.

Frierson is the Executive Director of the North American Hand Papermakers organization. Her public programming, education work, and cultural practice has shown up collaboratively in spaces such as: Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Park District, Chicago Torture Justice Center, Chicago Art Department, University of Illinois at Chicago Montgomery Ward Gallery, Marwen, Time Being Tattoo, Flower World Tattoo, Dieu Donné, Hook Pottery & Paper, Sitter Studio NYC, Smart Museum of Art, and Penland School of Craft.