Emmie Pappa (They/Them)
I am a multidisciplinary artist and folklorist based in Bend, Oregon. Working across visual arts, ceramics, leatherwork, sculpture, and textiles, I explore how creative practices and the objects people make reflect relationships between culture, memory, place, and the environment. My work often transforms discarded and readily available materials into imaginative, functional, and performative objects, including costume, papier-mâché masks, and puppets.
Drawing on Guatemalan visual traditions, Western folk art, and personal and familial histories, I investigate how objects carry stories and cultural memory across time and space. My practice explores the relationship between tradition and innovation: how inherited knowledge is preserved, adapted, and transformed through individual expression. As a mixed-race, first-generation American, I approach making as a way to explore the complexities of ancestry, belonging, and identity.
I hold a PhD in Folklore from Indiana University Bloomington, with a focus on material culture. My background in folklore informs an expansive, material-driven practice that moves between making, collecting, documenting, and teaching. I am increasingly interested in bringing functional and performative objects together with storytelling, particularly through masks, puppetry, and crankies—traditional moving shadow-puppet theaters. Across these forms, I approach art-making as both an investigation of the world and an invitation to imagine it differently.
