Malery Nguyễn is foremost a papermaker but also an art conservator, home cook, and gifter of small things. Recently, she has been making lamps as an exercise in structural papermaking that explores the texture, flexibility, and strength of her handmade papers. She works primarily with banana leaf fibers, a familiar cooking ingredient and native plant to her family’s home in Vietnam. Malery’s work investigates Southeast Asian print history through the labor and craft of people who made books, prints, and paper with their hands. She seeks to challenge how artisans and craftspeople are defined by their labor capital through investigations of their individual creative authority in Vietnam’s colonial history. She intends her work to speak for the integrity of its own making, from sourcing the fibers that make up the paper to the subtle placement of rice glue to mend papers together. She earned her degree in Architecture from Brown University in 2021 and currently lives on unceded Lenape land in New York City.