New Work

This piece builds on my recent test models and copper vase using a diagonal shift element. This is my first model incorporating more than one diagonal shift into the same model. It’s certainly more challenging to collapse the model – I almost had to wrestle the paper into shape. It’s also particularly difficult to do any sort of shaping to the middle tier since there’s no way to reach inside of it to manipulate the paper.

As always, I painted the paper before folding it. Since the folds created strong diagonals, I used the paint to incorporate additional diagonal design elements.

As was pointed out to me on Flickr several months ago, these sorts of designs have a bit of a surrealist twist. I had the original idea for this series shortly after visiting the Magritte Museum in Brussels, which probably influenced me subconsciously. My origami has always had a contrast between simple, elegant forms and an engineering aspect of analyzing how the shape is constructed from one uncut rectangle of paper. This series takes that analysis aspect and makes it more explicitly part of the shape  itself.

After folding several test models with a diagonal shift, I was finally able to incorporate that design element into a more complex model. For this model, I used black Elephant Hide paper and painted all of the paper except for the diagonal shift element with gold and copper acrylic paint. Because the top half of the model is shifted so far to one side, the vase normally would be very unstable and prone to tipping over. I put a few pebbles in the bottom of the vase to weigh it down. Since the paper is so light, it doesn’t take much extra weight to make it stable.

In my recent oval models, I have been combining segments of different sizes of circles. Here I’ve taken the same idea of combining portions of circles in a different direction. This corrugation is based on three equally sized semicircles that alternate directions like in the letter S. As the outer circles get larger, the inner circle gets smaller, and vice versa.

In this model, the outer edges were challenging to fold because there is not much tension to hold the paper in place. This design could be extended indefinitely as a series of repeating curves, or it could be combined with circles of other sizes to create a closed form like in my oval forms.

Building on my recent oval test model, I folded this bowl based on an oval. Again, the oval is made of portions of circles of two sizes. Here, the radius of the small circle is 2″ at the widest point, and the radius of the large circle is 6″ at the widest point. The collapse of the bottom half of the form was fairly straightforward, but the top part was more challenging because the form wanted to become more circular. Overall, I think ovals will work fairly well for relatively short, simple forms but will be challenging for taller forms and more complex forms. Even though I think a lot of interesting things could be done with ovals, I’m using the ovals mostly as a building block toward some of my other ideas that are in the works.

A couple of months ago I played with hand-marbling paper using oil paints. The paper is still an experiment, but I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. The oil tended to create ripples in the paper, which limits the complexity of what I can fold. This model is a fairly simple design to try out my new paper. This piece is folded from one uncut rectangle of Strathmore pastel paper.

This piece is also part of my Intersections series. This piece combines the shape of my recent Hinged Bowl with an offsetting of the two halves I first experimented with last spring. This type of shape was my original plan when I started designing the Janus Vase, but figuring out a crease pattern that would work required approaching the form in a different way. This piece is folded from one uncut rectangle of Elephant Hide paper.

This piece is a continuation of my Intersections series, continuing with the same themes of unity and contrast as in my last piece.  Instead of playing with a reversal of top and bottom, I am exploring a reversal of inside and outside, which gave one convex form and one concave form.  The sharp inward slope near the base of the concave form was surprisingly difficult to collapse smoothly.  Each form is folded from one rectangle of Elephant Hide paper.

This vase is part of my Intersections series.  Here I am continuing to explore using flat planes to divide a curved form.  In this piece, I am playing with themes of unity and contrast between the two halves.  The two parts have the same curve defining their shape, but with a reversal of which end of the curve is the top and which is the bottom.  Each of the halves is folded from one uncut rectangle of Elephant Hide paper.

Janus was the Roman god of beginnings.  He was usually depicted with two faces pointing in opposite directions.  Likewise, this vase has two ‘faces’, two halves with different shapes.  I was originally trying to design a vase in a different shape, but I kept running into problems where I couldn’t get the paper to be where I needed it to be.  When I instead started paying attention to where the pleats naturally fell and let that guide my design, this vase was the result.  Because of the contrast in shape between the two halves, this form is probably more interesting that what I originally tried to design.

Like most of my recent work, this piece is part of my Intersections series.  The whole vase is folded from one rectangle of Elephant Hide paper.  This version has one small cut to help in collapsing the base, but I know how to redesign it without any cuts.

This vase is the newest addition to my Intersections series, using the modified pleating folding technique I developed for my last piece.  Here I am continuing to use flat planes to intersect the curved form, uniting a precise mathematical shape with a flowing organic shape.  This piece uses vertical planes to cut the form into thirds and horizontal planes to cut off the three parts at different heights.  I started planning this piece in July and only recently decided I had the time and folding ability to actually make it.  Each of the three parts is folded from a rectangle of Elephant Hide paper.