Rebecca Gieseking

Furman Show Photos

I installed my show, Intersections: The Art and Science of Folded Paper, in the art gallery at Furman last Friday. The show will be open until October 25. There will be a reception on October 24 from 6:30-8:30pm, and I will be giving a gallery talk at 7pm.

The show includes 16 pieces from 3 series, as well as 6 crease patterns (two from each series). The pieces from my Intersections and Diagonal Shift series are all ones I’ve posted previously; the third series and the crease patterns are brand new for this show.

The new series includes the four pieces in the back row of the photo above. It’s not obvious because of the perspective, but these pieces are quite large: up to about 22 inches tall! After almost two years of working in mostly neutral colors, I was very ready to fold some brightly-colored pieces. I’ll post more about this series later.

The crease patterns are also newly drawn, and printed the actual size of the paper I used to fold the pieces. They help connect the artistic aspects of my work with the mathematical/engineering side. I’ve posted several crease patterns previously for test folds and simpler pieces, but these are the first I’ve drawn for full models. Again, I’ll post more details later.

Here are a few more views of the show:

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Upcoming Show: Furman University, Greenville, SC

I am getting ready for a solo show of my artwork this fall at Furman University in Greenville, SC. The show, Intersections: The Art and Science of Folded Paper, will be open October 6-25 with a reception 6:30-8:30 pm October 24. Since I’m an alum, the art department invited me to do this year’s Homecoming art show.

The show will include pieces from my Intersections and Diagonal Shift series, as well as a new series I haven’t posted any photos of yet. I will also be showing several crease patterns to show the scientific/engineering aspects of my work.

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Test Folds: Assorted Corrugations

The full box of corrugations
The full box of corrugations

Over the past month, I have been test-folding lots of corrugation patterns in preparation for a new series. Most of these are not original designs; they are folded from crease patterns, reverse-engineered, or experiments vaguely based on images from the Flickr Origami Corrugations group. These are all folded from very cheap origami paper, not anything at all suitable for complex designs. I have previously folded a couple designs incorporating both pleated and corrugated segments, but only with very simple corrugated patterns. I am hoping that with more practice, I will be able to incorporate more complex corrugations and tessellations into my vases.

Here are a couple closer-up images of some of the corrugations:

Close-up of a few corrugations
Close-up of a few corrugations
Close-up of a few corrugations
Close-up of a few corrugations
Close-up of a few corrugations
Close-up of a few corrugations

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New Work: Double Diagonal Shift Vase 3

Double Diagonal Shift Vase 3
Double Diagonal Shift Vase 3

This piece is part of my Diagonal Shift series and is very strongly based on one of the earliest pieces in the series. I used (almost) the same crease pattern but re-designed the painted pattern. The painted pattern is somewhat reminiscent of my Floating Diagonal Shift, where the painted parts would align if the segments of the vase were aligned with each other. I enjoy creating the illusion of impossibility with these pieces.

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New Work: Diagonal Shift Variant Vase 2

Diagonal shift variant vase 2
Diagonal shift variant vase 2

This piece is a continuation of my Diagonal Shift series, building especially from one of the earlier pieces in the series. When I first tried folding this concept, there wasn’t enough difference between the slopes of the diagonal line and the horizontal line, so the two halves of the vase weren’t clearly separated enough. When I re-designed the form for this piece, I made the diagonal much more dramatic. This creates an illusion that the top half of the vase is balancing on the tip of the bottom half. Of course, as in the other pieces in this series, there is a narrower piece connecting the two halves.

I also played a bit more with the colors in this piece. The copper and the green-gold give more color contrast than I have been using. Also, it’s not obvious from the photo, but the copper areas have a thin layer of copper paint over a layer of gold. The subtle color differences add more interest to the piece.

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New Work: Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase

Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase
Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase

I’ve folded quite a few pieces in my Diagonal Shift series recently, and this piece is the latest addition to the series. In all of my previous pieces in the series, I’ve either used only one diagonal shift element or used two diagonal shifts in the same plane. In this piece, the two diagonal shifts are rotated 90 degrees from each other, and the painted designs follow the same pattern rotation. Keeping track of the rotation made this piece especially challenging to design, particularly drawing the crease pattern onto the paper.

It’s interesting to see how this piece came out. Since most of the pieces in this series have all their angles in the same plane, there are a few very interesting viewing angles, but the other views don’t add much of anything. But this piece has a more complicated geometry in three dimensions. It’s hard to pick a view to photograph because there isn’t any one angle that shows the full shape (more views below). Seeing the relationships between the shapes from a variety of angles make the piece more interesting to look at in real life.

Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase (view 2)
Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase (view 2)
Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase (view 3)
Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase (view 3)
Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase (view 4)
Rotated Diagonal Shift Vase (view 4)

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Test Folds: Assorted Tessellations

I recently returned from a long plane trip, and I had a lot of time for origami while in transit. Since my typical folding style isn’t very conducive to folding while traveling, I decided to practice folding tessellations from Eric Gjerde’s book, Origami Tessellations: Awe-Inspiring Geometric Design. It’s a nice introduction, building up from the basic folding techniques to a variety of simple and complex tessellations.

Tessellations
Tessellations

I have folded a couple tessellations before, but this was my first time folding a lot in a short period of time. I learned the proper way to fold grids to minimize errors, but folding the grids still takes a long time (for 32 divisions, close to an hour for a square grid and longer for a hexagonal grid). These tessellations are all folded from cheap 6-inch squares of paper, which isn’t ideal. The paper gets soft too quickly, which limits the complexity of the models I could successfully fold. I would like to eventually incorporate more tessellated/corrugated elements into some of my own 3D designs, but it may still be a while before I build up the skills to do that well.

Tessellations 1
Tessellations 1
Tessellations 2
Tessellations 2
Tessellations 3
Tessellations 3
Tessellations 4
Tessellations 4
Tessellations 5
Tessellations 5

 

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Crease patterns: Diagonal shift variants

I’ve previously posted several crease patterns for my diagonal shift designs. Since posting those crease patterns, I designed a diagonal shift variant where the top and bottom halves of the paper form tubes of different widths and folded several models based on that design. Here are some crease patterns for a couple versions of diagonal shift variants. The dimensions on these don’t quite match any of the models I’ve folded, but they at least show the approach I used.

First, the single diagonal shift variant:

Diagonal shift variant
Diagonal shift variant

The bottom half of this crease pattern is identical to the crease patterns I posted before. Just above the middle, the diagonal lines only go partway past the middle of each gore, and the top section forms a narrower tube. This crease pattern gives something similar to the central part of this model.

These designs can also be combined in a couple ways. One option is to mirror the diagonal shift element vertically, giving a double diagonal shift pattern like the one in this vase:

Double diagonal shift variant
Double diagonal shift variant

Another other option is to also shift the top diagonal shift section over by 8 gores (half the width of the paper, excluding the overlap), which gives something like this model:

Double diagonal shift variant 2
Double diagonal shift variant 2

The math behind these designs is a good bit more complicated than I enjoy doing by hand, so I’ve set up spreadsheets to automatically do most of the math for me. I haven’t written about that aspect yet, but I might do that at some point when I have time.

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Two upcoming shows!

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be participating in two origami shows this summer!

1. FAVA Folding Festival

The FAVA gallery in Oberlin, OH has been hosting the FAVA Folding Festival since 2008, organized by James Peake. The info for this year’s show isn’t online yet, but the show will be open from May 11 until late July. I will have about 6 pieces in the show, including selections from both my Intersections and Diagonal Shift series.

2. Surface to Structure

Surface to Structure: Folded Forms will be exhibited at the Cooper Union in New York City. This was also the site of the first origami exhibit in the United States, in 1959. The show will be open June 19 – July 4 and is curated by Uyen Nguyen with co-advisors Sok Song and Patsy Wang Iverson. I will have one piece from my Diagonal Shift series in the show.

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Test models: Diagonal Intersections

Bisected diagonal shift
Bisected diagonal shift

This test model is a combination of my two recent series: Diagonal Shifts and Intersections. Even though this piece worked decently as a test model, it doesn’t work quite well enough yet for me to use this in a real model. Hopefully if I do another test fold, I’ll be able to fix some of those problems.

I’ve done a lot of engineering to figure out how to fold my recent series, but I haven’t shown much of the process. This time I took some photos of my first couple test folds to share. I started with some of the measurements I’ve previously used for the diagonal shift models. Creating the flat plane of the model is basically just folding down a rhombus to a single line. My first attempt was to fold the central rhombus into a waterbomb base:

Diagonal intersection draft 1 back
Diagonal intersection draft 1 back
Diagonal intersection draft 1 front
Diagonal intersection draft 1 front

This design looks great from the front, but the back won’t work for the full model. The large triangle sticking up in the back will get in the way of the curved portion of the model. A good start, but not quite useable.

Then I started trying to figure out how to get rid of that extra triangle. I started by inverting the waterbomb base so the triangle was sticking out the front of the model instead of out the back. Then I squash-folded the triangle to flatten it against the front of the model:

Diagonal intersection draft 2 back
Diagonal intersection draft 2 back
Diagonal intersection draft 2 front
Diagonal intersection draft 2 front

This design is much better from the back – there’s no extra paper between the two flaps along the central diagonal. That means I should be able to use it for more complex models. The problem is that the front is very messy-looking: the extra paper from the central rhombus is visible and not especially nice to see there.

In my third test fold, I combined the best parts of my two first test folds. I squash-folded the central rhombus, but I also hid the extra paper on the back side of the model:

Diagonal intersection draft 3 back
Diagonal intersection draft 3 back
Diagonal intersection draft 3 front
Diagonal intersection draft 3 front

This final design is what I used in the full test model (photo at the beginning of this post). I combined it with the diagonal shift approach I’ve already written about. Combining the flat part and the curved part is still a challenge, but it’s one I’m working on. I’m hoping to fold at least one or two full models based on this design, but it may be too complicated to turn into a full series.

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