Rebecca Gieseking

I realized recently that it’s been just over ten years since I started designing origami vases and bowls! That’s a good opportunity to show off a few highlights of how my artwork has grown and changed over that time.

The pre-design days

Even though I’ve only been designing for ten years, I’ve enjoyed doing origami since preschool. In college, I got really into modular origami, and quite a few of my friends ended up with gifts of various models. As a double-major in art and chemistry, origami-related themes were a recurring theme in my artwork. My senior art show in 2009 at Furman University was a series of 24″ x 24″ oil paintings of paper cranes.

The first designs

After I started grad school in chemistry, I no longer had the large blocks of times I needed for painting, but I still have a drive to create. In spring 2011, I went to a lecture by Robert Lang where he talked about the math and engineering in origami, which inspired me to get back into origami. I had a very brief foray into folding representational models, but quickly figured out I wasn’t actually all that interested folding those. While looking for crease patterns online, I stumbled upon Philip Chapman-Bell’s Flickr page, where he had several crease patterns of curved-crease vases. I folded a few of his crease patterns and realized the math behind them couldn’t be all that complicated. My first design was a little underwhelming, but it was enough to get me hooked.

Curves and organic shapes (2011-present)

It only took me a few months to get bored with only folding designs based on symmetric curved-crease pleats and start exploring ways of distorting the symmetry. One of my earlier explorations was spirals, which worked out best in the piece I’ve used as a profile picture in quite a few places in 2012.

I’ve never done an extensive series of more organic forms, but I’ve had quite a few brief forays into designs that are based more on curves. The curved-neck vases are one of my favorite examples of that. The design elements used to create the curved necks are the same ones I’ve used in a number of more geometric-looking vases, but applied in a slightly different way.

Intersections series (2012-2014)

The first major series I did was based on taking curved-crease pleated vase/bowl forms and intersecting them with vertical planes. There were two main things that attracted me to creating these types of designs. The first was the engineering challenge: figuring out how to combine the curved forms with flat planes. The second, more aesthetic goal was also a big piece: combining geometric elements that represent my scientific interests with more organic elements that represent my artistic interests.

Diagonal shifts (2013-2014)

The series that started getting me a good bit of attention in the origami world was my diagonal shift series, where the curved form is cut by a diagonal plane and shifted. I love how the diagonal shift element leads to shapes that look like they should be impossible to create from a single uncut sheet of paper, even though the shift along the diagonal comes very naturally from the construction of the twist. I also like how these pieces initially draw people in based on their aesthetic qualities, but once I have them drawn in, even people from outside of origami switch over to trying to figure out how they work. I have the privilege of using art to bring out people’s scientific/engineering thought processes! I realized after I started this series that part of the inspiration probably came from my visit to the Magritte museum in Brussels and spending a day there looking at his Surrealist artwork.

More exploration of distorted vases (2016-present)

A couple years after the original diagonal shift series, I started extending the geometric distortions to more complicated versions. These pieces are very modular, based on stacking different twist and bend motifs in various ways. I’m still working on developing more motifs that let me distort the vase-like forms in new ways, and on combining them to create interesting forms.

Mixed media (ceramics 2015-2016, knit 2020-present)

One other interest I’ve had is combining other media with origami. My first foray into that was with ceramics. Since working on the pottery wheel naturally tends to produce shapes that are similar to the pleated vase forms, it seemed like a good fit. I enjoyed finding ways of getting the clay and the paper forms to mimic each other.

More recently, I’ve done several pieces combining knit forms with origami. It’s taken a decent bit of work to figure out how to construct shapes similar to my origami forms in yarn, and that’s something I’m definitely still figuring out. Stiffening the yarn is a very slow process that I haven’t figured out how to speed up, so I’m still deciding whether this is a direction I’ll take much further.