Sometimes a gift gets you instead of the other way around. That’s how it felt seeing Tiffany Fultz’s Dragon Folio for the first time at The Old Hotel Art Gallery in Othello. It’s shiny and purple with a yellow shimmer. Its eye dilates ever so slightly when it catches yours, communicating permission or forbidding one to open it. Inside, there are only two pages, but each page opens and opens and opens into pockets and pieces hidden within themselves all full of dragons and mystical words. There were more questions than answers once the book was opened. Was one supposed to add to it? Was I allowed to take it home with me?
It took a year of pondering, and a chat with its creator to understand. Interestingly enough, the book feels to me the same way the artist feels about her art – sort of a mystery but totally essential to her life.
“I just like to make things,” Fultz said, “this is my get away from the hustle and bustle.” Futlz is the librarian at Wahitis Elementary School in Othello. She moved to town with her family at age four, and has since grown her own life with her husband and two children there. She’s fostered a love of books and paper through her life, education, profession and hobby.
Futlz is interested in crafting “anything to do with paper – making cards, paper houses, decoration, mini albums and folios.” She shares her love of crafting with her parents – who are quilters – and her students with what she calls “Maker Space” days, where she puts out all sorts of crafty materials and the kids get to be creative in whatever way they can imagine to be.
There is some question in Fultz’s own mind as to whether or not she is an artist. “I’m no creative,” she said, “I’m re-creative. I see a lot of things and I like to pull things around that I see and combine them and make them my own. But I don’t often see something from a blank slate and get ideas from everywhere.” She doesn’t hope to replace her job with her hobby, either, or even make it a side hustle. “I love my job reading to kids every day. I love my job, I don’t want to not have to do that,” she said.
That being the case, it makes her work quite rare – The Old Hotel has an ocassional book or two, or some cards Fultz has created. Or, if you’re lucky enough to be her friend she might let you shop in the boxes of finished projects under her bed. All her items are priced to simply cover a bit of seed funding for new project materials.
Thankfully, after a year of thinking of the Dragon Book, it was still sitting there in The Old Hotel’s glass case. “A lot of people look at it, they like to flip through it,” said Samantha Copas, Executive Director of The Old Hotel and the nonprofit that supports it, “but no one had bought it yet.
If art is meant to make one think, ask questions and excite you, while also just being what it is with no expectation of being the same one thing to every person – then the Dragon Folie is art, and Tiffany is an artist… at least in my book.
