Origami Tessellations

Hyperbolic Paraboloid, by Rui Roda

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 the talk, that’s fine too – you’ll just miss out on all the fun folding beforehand.

Items to bring:

• a bone folder for making strong creases
• a snack and a drink to share after the workshop, which is your contribution to the event

You need to register for the event to attend, so please do so if you wish to come! it should be a lot of fun, and we’ll have some great origami show-and-tell exhibits to share.

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, and it made a great impression on me. In the last few years, I find myself turning to paper art pioneers like Josef Albers, Jean-Claude Correia, and Ron Resch for motivation to push past self-imposed boundaries.

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 the layers, all made of pure bacterial cellulose to ensure maximum bonding and integration. This means: one single sheet of paper with multiple levels of content within one page!

The finished work will be precisely laser-cut and won’t look anything like this hand-cut sample, quickly done to show the process. It may or may not survive the evening of the talk after it gets handled a fair amount. Let’s hope it does as I’ve already had a request to acquire this piece!

If you’re in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area and wish to hear more about the process, please have a look at the event details above, and I hope to see you there.

4 separate layers of text, 5 layers of paper. all compressed into a single sheet

4 separate layers of text, 5 layers of paper. all compressed into a single sheet

4 separate layers of text, 5 layers of paper. all compressed into a single sheet

4 layers of paper, two layers of decorative paper inserts

4 layers of paper, two layers of decorative paper inserts

Updated – October 31st, 2016: Added recording of my artist talk.