The theme of Paper Alchemy is not an abstract concept—it’s a medium.

James Thurman, associate professor of metalsmithing and jewelry at the University of North Texas’ College of Visual Arts and Design created a material he named Thurmanite® from layers of recycled paper bonded with a plant-based eco-resin. He’s been working with the material in his own art for nearly twenty years.

“I trademarked the name because I always hoped others would work with it,” Thurman says. Now, he’s making that dream a reality.

Thurman is the curator of an upcoming exhibition of new works created by artists from across the United States, Italy, Kuwait, Scotland and Turkey. He reached out to metalsmiths, jewelers and other artists, asking them to create work incorporating a piece of Thurmanite®.

The process varied for each artist. Some sent Thurman meaningful materials to make into the Thurmanite® they would use—maps, medical texts, pulp fiction novels, artists’ own drawings and more. Others requested specific sizes, colors or types of paper. Still others “wanted to be completely surprised and just react to what I sent them,” Thurman says.

The results are brand-new artwork, jewelry and small sculptures by 38 different artists. The show debuted in Istanbul in 2021, and after an overwhelmingly positive response, Thurman added more artists to the traveling exhibition.

While Thurmanite® is the unifying aspect of the show, what each artist sees in the material is a reflection of themselves, their environments and their processes: images of water, nature, physical and psychological bodies.

“Working with Thurmanite® has truly been an amazing experience,” writes Nur Balkır, who worked with a piece of custom Thurmanite® made from her own drawings. “I was thrilled to see how our personal styles could feed and transform the other.”

For jeweler and metalsmith Andy Cooperman, “Working through the thin layers of Thurmanite® was an act of both revelation and loss.” The material for his piece, Atlas, was layered from maps. “Towns, lakes, rivers and place names emerged and, if I worked too aggressively, were carelessly eradicated,” he writes. “I learned not to become attached to a specific place or geographic feature. Only when the painstaking work of carving, sanding and polishing was complete did I know what I was left with—not unlike the past year with its false starts, dashed expectations and fragile understanding of how things will eventually look.”

Christian Fagerlund let the material’s layers inform the images he created:

“I began by observing the shapes, lines, textures, and edges that were already present in the surface, and then let my visual imagination react to those preexisting cues,” he writes. “A curve becomes an iris, nostril, lobe of cartilage or fat. A strip of darkness suddenly reads as a heavy upper eyelid. Quickly these features arrange themselves into a face, identity, and expression that I could neither have planned, nor unsee once observed.”

“Everyone who made a piece for Paper Alchemy took a very different approach,” Thurman says. “I am so proud and honored that everyone put so much heart and thought into their pieces.”

Thurman himself has a piece in Paper Alchemy, which is part of a series he’s working on related to the Deadly Sins & Heavenly Virtues, incorporating lathe-turned Thurmanite®, spun metal, a hand painted miniature, stone setting, and other fabrication techniques.

“Overall, I’ve just been overwhelmed by everyone’s enthusiasm about the exhibition,” Thurman says, adding that most people unfamiliar with the material are surprised to learn it’s made from recycled paper. “It is my hope that people will think of recycling in a completely new way after seeing Paper Alchemy,” he says.