Author: ericgjerde

Bauhaus Paperfolding Workshop in Asheville NC March 8th!

    I’m fascinated with the paper folding exercises that were used by Josef Albers in the Bauhaus School, and then later on at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. These folding exercises helped students to learn about the properties of materials, and were one of the fundamental tools that Albers used to guide his students to think differently. One of his guiding principles was “learning by doing”, or “Werklehre” in German. This was also the organizing principle of the Black Mountain College, so it’s not surprising that he came to BMC after he fled Nazi Germany (along with so many of the Bauhaus instructors!) To that end, I’m giving a short workshop on Bauhaus paperfolding and a talk on origami this Tuesday, March 8th starting at 4PM at the Asheville Bookworks in Asheville, NC, in conjunction with the Book and Print Arts Collective of Western North Carolina. If you are interested in attending, please register via email by March 6th. The talk on origami will begin around 5:30PM, so if you wish to just attend …

Work on display at American Craft Council

A new article about some pieces I have on display at the American Craft Council. The show also features two large works from my wife Ioana Stoian – including our favorite joint effort, Unison. Here’s a snippet from the included Q&A in the article, which I highly recommend checking out: Who and what inspires you? I draw a lot of inspiration from shapes and patterns I see every day – both in nature and in the manmade world. After working with tessellations for so many years, I see them intrinsically in anything that repeats – they always catch my eye, and I am drawn to them. This often manifests itself later on in a piece, sometimes rather unknowingly. I was heavily influenced by the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists, as a teenager; I grew up in a military family, and I spent one particularly isolated summer after a cross-country relocation cooped up in my room with a stack of great art books on that period in history. I had not known such a thing existed, artistically, …

Artist Roundtable Talk February 16th

Hello All, I’m part of an artist roundtable talk this coming February 16th at 6PM at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, one of three panelists discussing our Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship projects for 2016. My project is an innovative exploration of my beloved bio-paper – paper grown in-situ from bacterial cellulose – using this amazing and unusual paper to create a limited edition of books featuring the poetry of e.e. cummings. Using the unique properties of the translucent paper, I will be embedding the text at varying depths within the paper itself, resulting in quasi-three dimensional wordplay; which makes the work of e.e. cummings perhaps the ideal source text to use. More on this to come, but in the meantime, please enjoy these photos of work samples I created for the talk next week, and a short video clip of a fresh sheet of this paper after harvesting. The work samples are based on the concept I am exploring for my project; laminations of thin sheets of biofilm with embedded text objects between …

Fluffy the Cat - Origami

Fluffy: Cute new cat how-to video

  To continue the origami how-to video fun, here’s a new one from my partner Ioana Stoian showing how to fold a cute origami cat designed by Roberto Gretter and Ioana during the Polish origami convention earlier this year. What a fun little cat! And it’s based on 60 degree angles, which for geometers like me is particularly satisfying…

Geometry in Porcelain – short video

I saw this fantastic little 4:30 minute documentary on Bobby Jaber, a retired chemistry teacher who has spent the last 20 years working with porcelain to represent geometric shapes and solids. It’s beautiful artwork and well worth seeing. It reminds me a lot of Shuzo Fujimoto, a Japanese chemistry teacher who decided to fold paper to help represent chemical structures for his students; he was one of the first origami tessellation masters, and his explorations became the basis for most of what exists in the origami tessellation world these days. I don’t know what it is about retired chemistry teachers, but they sure seem to have a gift, don’t they?   PORCELAINIA from Dave Altizer on Vimeo.