Rebecca Gieseking

This piece is one I folded a couple of weeks ago using the same approach as my recent luminary. On the outside of the form, I drew a small spiral of a pattern in ink, which gives a hint of what is on the inside. The inside is painted and has two more patterned spirals.

The shape of this form creates interesting patterns of light and shadow when the model is lit. Near the middle of the model, the section just below the crease line that slopes away from the light appears much darker than the section just above – if the middle of the model flared out much more, the outer part would actually be in shadow. Also, the pattern drawn on the outside appears much crisper than the patterns drawn on the inside. Here is a close-up of the patterns:

For the past several years, I have been primarily folding curved-crease pleated designs where the pleats are vertical. In this piece, I changed the orientation of the pleats so I could create a different type of curvature of the piece. By using horizontal pleats that vary in width around the piece, I curved the vertical axis of the piece. This piece was primarily a test of a folding style I haven’t used much, but I’m hoping to explore this style of folding more.

I have designed a couple luminaries before (several years ago), but this time I decided to put the design on the inside. I started with plain white Elephant Hide paper and painted one side a mottled green/blue. Then, I drew the black pattern on the same side of the paper with a marker. Since the painted side is on the inside, the design only appears when the luminary is lit from the inside.

Here are a couple more views of the bottom of the piece to show how this works:

This is my Christmas design for this year, a variation on my ornament designs from the past two years. This year, I decided to record a video of the folding process. The video starts right after I finished scoring the creases (you can see the rulers and scoring tool on the desk). I start by pre-creasing along the scored (straight and curved) lines. I then glue the paper into a tube and collapse the form in stages, starting from the middle. I used a combination of tape and rubber bands to hold the form in shape. At the very end, I take the tape and rubber bands off an ornament I had folded earlier to reveal the final shape.

I was recently commissioned to fold a smaller version of my recent large Green Vase. I kept the same painted pattern, but I used a little yellower green, which is more the color I originally wanted.

It’s fun seeing the two pieces together! Even though the smaller piece is almost 10 inches tall, it looks very little and cute next to the larger piece.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been folding stars, fractals, and tessellations for fun. I bought some pretty papers several years ago that are too thin for my normal style of folding, but I finally used them for some models that don’t require as sturdy of paper. None of these designs are original – they include Chris Palmer’s Flower Tower, Evan Zodl’s EZ Star, Dasa Severova’s Star Mathilda, tessellations from Eric Gjerde’s book, and a few others. These models are on the wall in my room now, and they help fill up some space that has been empty for quite a while.

I recently posted the first two pieces from my new large series that I folded over the summer. Here are the final two pieces from the large series for my show at Furman:

The turquoise vase is the tallest piece of the series by a bit, at about 22 inches tall. Folding on such a large scale is a bit more challenging than folding smaller pieces. These pieces are so large that reaching to the bottom required essentially putting my entire arm inside the piece. The folding requires a whole lot more maneuvering of the large paper, and the paper barely fit on my desk.

The purple bowl is actually folded from two long rectangles cut from the same sheet of Elephant Hide. Instead of one 70 x 100 cm sheet, I essentially cut and re-combined to make one 50 x 140 cm sheet (minus a bit of overlap). That let me fold a wider bowl than would be possible from a single uncut sheet.  I like the appearance of the having the white stripe on top of the black and purple, especially since the paper was originally white.

I’ll be back at Furman next weekend for the reception for my show (October 24, 6:30-8:30 pm) and to take down the show.

This summer, I folded a series of four large-scale pieces in preparation for my show at Furman University. These pieces are each folded from almost an entire sheet of Elephant Hide paper, cut down slightly from the 70 x 100 cm sheet. These two pieces are each around 20 inches (50 cm) tall.

After folding two series in fairly neutral colors, I was very excited to start a new series with much brighter colors. I kept the black and white in these pieces and the diagonal elements to create connections with my recent two series.

As always, I painted the paper before folding it. Painting on such a large scale creates some challenges I hadn’t dealt with in my smaller pieces. I built up several layers of watered-down acrylic paint on each piece to get the value and hue I wanted. Since I knew from past experience that it’s very hard to paint a flat color, I intentionally added a bit of texture to the paint using a brush.

I’ll write more about the folding process for these pieces when I post the final two pieces of the series.