Rebecca Gieseking

This piece is a continuation of my exploring pieces that combine origami and ceramics. The shape is very similar to one of my earlier Intersection pieces. This is folded from Lizard Hide paper, and so far I’m very happy with how the paper folds. The colors didn’t photograph particularly well because of the difference in shine between the glaze and the paper, but the blue and the green go together better in real life.

Starting this summer, I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time working in a ceramics studio and start working on a series of pieces that incorporate both origami and ceramic parts. This is the first of that series from when I was first starting to re-learn how to use clay after a six-year hiatus, and I should be finishing some more similar pieces in the coming weeks. Since I made two halves of the clay piece, I also made two origami pieces:

The process for creating the combined pieces is a bit more complicated that just designing an origami piece. I started by making a round ceramic piece on the wheel, then cut it in half and added the flat planes once it was dry enough to hold its shape. Unlike in origami, it’s tough to plan the exact size of a ceramic piece because the clay shrinks during the drying and firing process, so I didn’t start the origami part until the ceramics were completely finished. That way, I could make sure the sizes of the two pieces matched up correctly.

The origami is folded from grainy paper, another of the new papers I’m trying out. I like the weight and foldability of this paper a lot. The wet-folding will take some adjustment, but I’m definitely interested in testing how this paper works for more complicated models.

I bought some new types of paper from Brian Webb at the Centerfold convention in Columbus about a month ago, and this is the first one I’ve gotten to try. This model is folded from Bear Hide paper, but the color reminded me of stained wood (hence the name of this piece).

This was an interesting paper to try out, but it’s one I would only use again for simpler and more geometric models than this. The middle segment folded very nicely, but I had more trouble with the more subtle curves. It was a bit hard to wet-fold this paper, especially since my usual method of taping things in place tended to tear the top layer off the paper. But it’s nice to have a different selection of colors and learn how different papers behave.

This piece combines some of the organic designs I have folded with my Intersections series. Each half of the piece is folded from one uncut circle with one white side and one black side. I like the contrast created by the reversal of the two color patterns.

Since the rest of my Intersections pieces are folded from rectangles, the folding style here is a bit different; the circle allows for the extra paper around the outside to create the waves. The centers of the bowl are shifted away from the centers of the circles, so the waves only extend toward the outside of the bowls.

I recently decorated my wall with an origami pattern. I’ve done another wall design before (and a previous iteration of the butterflies that I never posted).

The butterflies are Akira Yoshizawa’s design (instructions here; many other diagrams and video instructions available online). It’s a fairly simple design but very elegant. I folded about 100 butterflies from squares ranging from 2 inches to 6 inches, and the total pattern is about 3 feet x 6 feet.

Here’s a close-up that shows the individual butterflies more clearly:

I’ve been experimenting lately with a variety of geometric folding techniques. This vase combines the twist pattern I recently designed with one of my earliest vase designs. I like seeing how the new segment changes the overall feel of the vase. The central portion repeats the curved shape of the full vase, but with a lot smaller height.

I’ve been interested in combining tessellations with three-dimensional forms for quite a while, but it’s been a challenge. This is the first piece where I’ve incorporated a tessellated design all over the vase form. I changed the vertical spacing of the dots based on the width and how far apart the dots would be horizontally.

The tessellation is my own design, although it’s simple enough that it may be a re-invention of someone else’s design. I was inspired to fold this design shortly after I folded Lydia Diard’s Circles tessellation because I liked the look of the raised circular (or really, dodecagonal) dots. I figured out how to adapt her design from a hexagonal grid to a square grid, which I posted previously (top photo, bottom right piece). From there, I was able to figure out how to combine the tessellation with the curved-crease vase shapes I usually work with.

This design is a first attempt, and I’d like to find other ways of incorporating tessellated and corrugated elements into my designs. The dots here are visible, but they don’t stand out much more than the horizontal and vertical lines. I’m exploring other ways of combining textures and folded patterns to create visual interest on three-dimensional designs.

Recently, I’ve returned to more purely geometric designs, exploring some new ideas.

This vase looks very clean from the outside, but the folds hidden inside are a bit more messy. I figured out what dimensions I needed for the insets and just hid the extra paper inside and used glue to hold everything in place. Since the angled lines on the main faces are at 45 degrees, the triangles wind up being equilateral.

The second vase uses a bit different folding approach. Creating the twist is actually fairly straightforward – I would be surprised if it’s not a re-invention of someone else’s idea. I used the same angle between each box here, but any angle from 0 to 90 degrees would work with very minor changes to the crease pattern. It could also work for shapes with more sides, not just squares. Collapsing the stack of twists is a bit tricky and uses a lot of paper, so I’m not sure I would want to try a stack too much taller than this.