Mari Jablonski
Mari Jablonski works with paper as both material and evidence. Using discarded maps, magazines, newspapers, brochures, cardboard, and sustainably sourced kozo and lokta papers, she creates sculptural forms that address public lands, environmental responsibility, censorship, human rights, and the preservation of history.
Her current practice focuses on dismantling and reconstructing mass-market printed material. Maps and brochures, which often present information with an authoritative clarity, are broken apart and reconfigured into new topographies, organic forms, and abstract ecosystems. In this process, paper becomes more than a surface for information. It becomes a record of human intention, power, use, and value.
Jablonski’s relationship to making began early. Several women in her family worked across different creative disciplines, and time in the studio was a regular part of her childhood. Her mother made vitreous-enamel paintings in a small kiln; her older sister drew imagined creatures and surreal environments with Copic markers and pencils; and her grandmother continues to knit, crochet, sew, and embroider. The value of making, and the patience it requires, was established through this family environment.
At the age of nine, Jablonski’s aunt taught her to fold a simple origami box. The experience gave her an immediate sense of confidence. Writing and drawing had felt awkward and difficult, but precise folding came more naturally. Paper offered an accessible way to make something structured, intricate, and visually complete.
That early interest developed into modular origami sculptures for her Advanced Placement art portfolio in high school, followed by large-scale papier-mâché work for her undergraduate thesis exhibition. She earned a BFA with Honors in Art and Design, with a minor in Dance, from Alfred University in 2024.
Her education was deliberately broad. Before developing her senior thesis, Jablonski studied functional ceramics, glass, printmaking, drawing, choreography, and fiber arts. That range continues to inform the way she works. She has added yarn to ceramic objects, used handspun yarn to create an embroidered self-portrait, and adapted fiber processes to paper-based materials.
Today, she spins paper into threads that can be drawn on, painted, or woven; makes paper clay from cardboard scraps; and creates printed material for use in papier-mâché. Folding, spinning, layering, coiling, and quilling are not separate techniques in her practice. They are interconnected methods for testing the potential of a material that is often treated as disposable.
Material choice is also conceptual. Jablonski’s attention to sustainable and discarded sources developed alongside an awareness of how materiality affects meaning. Her work argues for reuse over extraction and treats the sustainability of land and resources as an ethical as well as aesthetic concern.
The process is labor-intensive by design. Many works are built from thousands of paper fragments or modules, assembled through repetition. Jablonski cites Ilhwa Kim, Amy Genser, Amanda Chiarrucci, Sheila Hicks, Chie Hitotsuyama, and Judith Scott as important influences, particularly for the way their work moves between obsessive accumulation and meditative process.
This balance also helps her work through uncertainty. When a project’s overall direction is unclear, Jablonski does not wait passively for an idea to arrive. She continues folding, spinning, or coiling paper. The physical repetition keeps the work in motion while allowing the next decision to emerge. She sees creative blocks as a challenge to be worked through, much like solving a puzzle.
Nature is another lasting source of reference. A cross-country runner since elementary school, Jablonski spends time on trails in public forests near her home. The textures of the terrain, sounds, unexpected encounters with animals, and experience of getting lost or reorienting herself outdoors all enter the work.
Her tree-like sculptural series Can You Hear Me translates the experience of becoming lost on a run into an examination of personal growth. More recent projects have focused on discarded National Park Service maps and brochures, using those materials to consider public lands and landmarks facing climate change, extraction, and political instability.
Her work also addresses the social conditions that shape public life. Sustainability, LGBTQ+ rights, censorship, the erasure of truth and history, the importance of science, and universal human rights are recurring concerns. Jablonski describes herself as motivated by the challenge of “remaining whole in an increasingly fragmented world.” Making becomes, in part, an act of mending.
The work does not propose quick solutions. Instead, it asks for the kind of attention its own construction requires. Jablonski hopes viewers recognize that stewardship demands time, care, and sustained thought, particularly in the ways people describe, use, and justify their relationship to the world around them.
Her definition of success is similarly grounded in connection. She feels successful when someone stops before a work in a gallery or museum and takes time to reflect. She is more interested in being different or innovative than in following trends, especially when that means using materials in an unfamiliar way.
A formative experience came during a summer at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program for visual arts. Admitted with a portfolio emphasizing clay, paper construction, and nontraditional mixed media, Jablonski found herself working primarily in traditional drawing and painting alongside highly accomplished young artists. The experience was intimidating, but it taught her that discomfort and inexperience are not reasons to avoid a new process.
As she continues to develop work from salvaged paper and public materials, Jablonski is leaning toward more overt statements on social and environmental injustice. Her practice remains rooted in the same premise: attentive reconstruction can be both a material method and a way of thinking critically about what is worth preserving.
