Upon a Fold

mathilde nivet ... April 26, 2011

Mathilde Nivet lives and works in beautiful Paris. Here are some of her wonderful works, and there are many more to discover here.

white ribbon by atelier olschinsky... April 20, 2011

A ribbon. Nothing more, nothing less. These beautiful images are from the White Ribbon series by Atelier Olschinsky, a design studio based in Vienna.

paper collages by lena wolff... April 20, 2011

Feather Mountain, 2010. A collaboration with Jaime Knight (Above)
Red, Blue and Brown Paper Quilt, 2008 (Below)

Brown, Pink and White with Diamond, 2010

Night Flowering Tree, 2008

Willow, 2008

Midnight Branch, 2008

Night Mountain, 2007

Constellation, 2010

Lena Wolff uses paper, acrylic, graphite powder, watercolor, pencils, a hole punch, and pinpricks to create the most beautiful collages.

make it beautiful... April 19, 2011

I love this little stop-motion animation. It’s by Erin Jang, an art director from New York, and she created this springtime celebration of origami flowers, for the May 2011 iPad issue of Martha Stewart Living. Watch the animation here. It really makes me wish we weren’t heading into winter here in Oz!

money maker... April 18, 2011

Instrument of State – Iranian Rials (Above)
Collateral Damage – US Dollars (Below)

Instrument of State – Myanmar Kyats

Specimen (V) – Libyan Dinars

Specimen (III) – North Korean Won

Specimen (IV) – Turkmenistan Munat

The Calculation of Loss – English Pounds

Fallen Leaf Tree – US Dollars (From the Rise and Fall series)

Cherry Tree – Chinese Yuan (From the Rise and Fall series)

London based artist Justine Smith makes the most beautiful sculptures using paper money from all over the world. Her work with banknotes evolved from research she gathered about our relationship with money, the power it represents, and how it impacts our everyday lives. Amazing details, especially the fly!

new in the shop... April 15, 2011

This very beautiful cherry blossom paper model set, is now available in the shop.

furniture and folds... April 12, 2011

I have a guest post over at the lovely yellowtrace blog today. It’s all about origami inspired chairs. There are many good folds to discover, so be sure to take a look!

a paper animation by hélène ducrocq... April 11, 2011

These images show the making of one very perfect little paper animation. Creator, Hélène Ducrocq is an animation director, and part of a French multimedia collective called KaAM. This is their latest creation using a stop motion technique called Stratastencil. Can you believe three people, spent five days, cutting 1600 sheets of paper to create this!? That’s dedication folks!

Watch this beautiful animation titled Elle Demeure here, and the making-of here.

interview with elod beregszaszi... April 10, 2011

This week I interviewed one of my favourite paper artists, Elod Beregszaszi and today I get to share that interview with you guys – exciting! Elod truly is a paper folding/collapsing magician. He creates the most incredible paper sculptures, with creases in all the right places. They not only look amazing but they collapse and fold away for safe keeping too – a handy little feature I wish more objects in my apartment had.

I recently purchased one of Elod’s amazing pop-up cards as part of a fundraiser for Japan (I discovered it via Benja Harney’s tweet. Thanks Benj!) It was not only beautiful and affordable art, it also contributed to a great cause (read all about it at the end of this post). In an email that followed, Elod kindly mentioned that he loved my blog (ginormous compliment – thanks Elod :) and so that’s how I worked up the courage to ask him for an interview. Lucky me when he said he was more than happy to answer my questions.

I hope you enjoy reading all about Elod’s paper world. It’s fascinating and quite scientific too. I’ll confess that I actually emailed to ask him what a CP molecule was??? Um, science is not my strong point. But I do love the mingling of art and science. I think it’s a wonderful thing when different realms can strike such a beautiful balance

P.S. If you would like to give origamic architecture a go (in reference to the answer below), check out this book by Koichi Takahashi, a leading paper artist from Japan. Each project is classified into three levels of difficulty; and if you’re as keen as Elod, on your first attempt, you’ll start with the hardest one!

When did you start creating with paper, and what sort of things did you make?
It all started about 12 years ago when I made a simple pop-up card for the new year to send to friends and family. In order to find out how to make the pull-tab mechanism work, I paid a visit to the Japan Centre in London to look for books on paper engineering/origami. I came across a book called “American Houses” by Masahiro Chatani by accident, and was hooked on the spot. It was the only book I bought that day, and the first thing I did when I got back home was to cut and fold the most challenging model “House VI”, based on a building by Peter Eisenman. I still have that first origamic architecture piece, and I remember how the geometric awesomeness of the thing blew me away, as a finally collapsed the shape!

That was my introduction to origamic architecture, and I started searching (in vain – internet was still very new back then) for more books, and began experimenting, starting with generational step designs. In the beginning I was intending to launch a range of pop-up cards, but that never really got off the ground as my real interest lay in more sculptural development. That’s the main reason why I started concentrating on making kinetic paper sculptures, leading ultimately to my concertina folds.

Could you tell us a bit about your signature concertina folds?
I am really glad you asked about this. This series is the paper holy grail for me. Every CP molecule that pops into my head is distilled into the concertina configuration. In folding terms it’s like making a sentence out of words, and I love the way I can sculpt collapsible forms through the middle plane, between a valley and a mountain fold – or “spines” as I like to call them.

It is the combination of surface and volume expressed through the kinetic (collapsible) structure that really drives my exploration, and in my opinion is so unique to this origamic sub-genre of paper manipulation.

Your works are incredibly intricate and precise. Can you briefly describe your creative process?
I think in terms of shapes and contours or simply lines. If I get excited about a certain shape, I will start to investigate it in as many configurations as I can, to discover its visually balanced core dynamics. I hardly ever succeed but the journey takes me to interesting places. Almost everything worth while is chanced upon by accident, because that way it’s uninhibited by desire or expectation. Therefore my process means rigorous and often repetitive experimentation, resembling a scientific empirical method.

The other less defined approach is playing. This of course is equally exciting and fun, and usually begins with a bit of paper, and is more akin to traditional origami in that it is often purely composed from folds. In particular, I love playing about with reverse folds or the pleats that they build into. On a more complex level, I am a real fan of ‘corrugations’ both in terms of the tessellated Escheresque visuals and the ‘rigid foldable’ paper reliefs constructed from them.

Does mathematics ever get in the way of art?
Only to the extent that the proportions and geometries have to add up. Strangely I have always been a little afraid of numbers, trying to cope with their constellations through a visual understanding, but their abstracted logic has always been beyond my capabilities. That’s why my main tool is drawing and therefore visual, rather than maths which is analytical. I leave this genre to the really ‘clever’ computational origamists like Erik Demaine, who is making some amazing discoveries.

Ultimately numbers and shapes are both understood through the patterns that they produce, and my method takes the aesthetics of shape and volume as a starting point, which I then ‘resolve’ into a mechanically workable template.

What do you love about paper? And what type of paper do you generally use?
What’s there not to love (apart from the annoying and frequent paper-cuts)? It is the noblest material of them all! It has both elastic and rigid qualities which are so crucial to kinetic modeling, it’s tactile, cheap, and so rewarding. As Ingrid Siliakus once put it so well, “I experience an ultimate satisfaction at the moment when the paper, with a silenced sigh surrenders and becomes a blade-sharp crease”. No other material to my mind has this inherent integrity and offers such an emotional connection.

I use 220 gsm superfine white cartridge paper for most of my pieces.

Tools you can’t live without?
Steel ruler, x-acto knife and above all my Craft Robo.

If you had to choose just one, what would it be – to cut or to fold? (Hard question, sorry!)
That’s actually an easy one. Folding has it by miles. I hardly ever cut by hand any more as over the years I developed repetitive strain injury in my left arm and cannot exert enough concentrated pressure on the paper to make a clean cut. I did a complex cutting piece for a friend artist last summer and my fingers were numb for weeks afterward.

The Craft Robo was a godsend when I got my hands on it, and it allows me to work faster and concentrate on the folding which I find a much more meditative and satisfying activity.

Justine here! This (above) is the beautiful Japanese Tea House pop-up card, that I mentioned I bought earlier. It is something Elod has generously created to help raise money for Japan. So, you can now buy your very own hand-folded and signed piece of origamic architecture by none other than Elod himself. All proceeds go to those affected by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Thanks so much for your time Elod, and for inspiring us all with your paper magic!

christophe piallat... April 5, 2011

Christophe Piallat uses butchers paper (yes, butchers paper!), and both natural and artificial light, to create the most amazing paper installations. Above are just some of his works from both the Illuminal Range, and Illuminal States series.

Geology and nature are reoccurring themes throughout Christophe’s work. He says,

“These works seek to capture light within the context of a sculptural event, the by-product of which is translated into an environmental and sensorial installation… These installations utilise light to transform paper into pictorial moments in time.”