In late June, West Dean College was pleased to welcome Bob Ebendorf and Aleta Braun as collaborating Artists-in-Residence. From a base in the College Print Room, close to the Visual Arts department, Bob and Aleta spent time developing a series of works on paper, incorporating drawing, painting, collage, found materials and text.Born in Kansas, Bob Ebendorf has been an active teacher and practitioner for over forty years. Awarded a Fulbright grant to study in Norway in the early 60s, he went on to gain his Master's Degree from the University of Kansas. He is a founding member of Society of North American Goldsmiths and most recently was the recipient of the North Carolina Award, the State's highest civilian honour. For over 40 years he has been an active educator and practitioner and is currently Belk Distinguished Professor in the Arts at East Carolina University College of Fine Arts and Communication in Greenville, North Carolina.As an accomplished and innovative metalsmith and jewelery designer, Bob's practice has incorporated a variety of mixed and often incongruous media, often based on what can be 'rescued' from the relative obscurity of junk markets, landfills or everyday debris: scraps of paper, plastic, metal, glass, wood, toys, tintype, shards, shells, etc. Bob's playful reinvention of these artefacts - which in themselves possess powerful, if partial, histories both personal and public - transforms their power as discarded mementoes into a more improvisatory and expressive form of souvenir: not as something retroactive or fixed, but as suggestive of what is to come, what can be recombined and made new.Incorporating these found objects and materials with great skill, Bob effectively challenges assumptions about the nature of personal adornment and decoration, as well as radically shifting the parameters of the field of jewelery-making, particularly in relation to objects common to everyday life. His various assemblages - which recall the works of Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters and Jean Arp - have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Smithsonian Institute and the Victoria & Albert Museum.Aleta is a mixed media artist whose work is based in drawing, painting and collage, often focused on the sustained use of sketchbooks and journals. Her work explores the ostensibly simple language of geometric shapes and elemental forms - circles, dots, lines - as well as the layering of colour transparencies and delicate textures. With Aleta's passion for hand skills and mark-making, the collaborative residency in West Dean extends a 15-year tradition of personally exchanging works on paper ('greetings cards', books, leaflets, missives, etc.), an activity that itself has vibrant associations with the forms of mail art that emerged from Fluxus in the late 1950s, as well as the rich history of artists' publications.Throughout the time spent at West Dean, the evidence of such intimate personal exchanges between collaborators, no doubt combining both private and public languages, will create a body of work that embodies an open-ended dialogue between two distinct yet complimentary artistic sensibilities.