Rebecca Gieseking

This piece is my latest exploration of incorporating lace-like cutouts into my vases. The triangle lace pattern is similar the one I’ve used in several of my earlier pieces. I’m continuing the theme of having a brighter color inside the vase that shows through the cutouts.

One of the interesting things in this one is how well the cutouts in the front and back line up at certain angles, making it possible to see all the way through. That creates a neat effect that I wasn’t expecting to be so prominent in this form.

I’ve been working recently on a series of vases where I’ve been exploring cutting lace-like shapes into the vase. This piece is the latest in that series, moving away from only angular shapes of the cutouts. The cutout shapes spiral back and forth around the vase form and emerge as a flare from the top edge.

Similar to one of the other vases, I painted only the inside of the paper. The cutout sections of the paper reveal pops of the brighter color inside. I played a bit with cutting the curves using templates but ended up cutting most of the curves freehand. I was surprised how smoothly that went – and I’m still very surprised that I haven’t run into any major issues in any of these vases with cutting too far and destroying the paper!

I’ve been playing with variations on the diagonal shift quite a bit recently, including folding a shift from a cone instead of a cylinder (and from an inverted cone). This model is the first time I’ve incorporated that into a vase. Continuing with the theme from several of my recent vases, the painted lines are deliberately aligned to look like curved shapes on the finished model, instead of flat planes. I’m hoping to keep exploring in this direction and turn this into a series.

This summer, I folded a vase from a piece of paper with a lacy cut edge. This piece is a continuation of that theme. The lace pattern here is fairly similar, but it’s based on placing the cut triangles instead of placing the solid lines to cut around. The other big change is that I painted the inside of the paper. I like how that makes the cutouts visible even on the neck of the vase where you can only see through to the pleated layer just underneath the cutout. I’m really happy with how the photographs show the cutouts in the vase’s shadow too.

I’ve folded a few models recently that combine origami with knitting, and this piece is the latest in that series. The vertical curve of the origami piece is constructed using the pleats I explored several months ago. The curved sides of the knit piece are created using short rows, which mimic the pleats in the origami piece. Both pieces are based on triangular tubes, so the sides that face each other are both flat planes.