Origami Tessellations

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Holland Paper Biennale 2012

Published by ericgjerde

I am participating as one of the artists in the Holland Paper Biennale 2012, at the Museum Rijswijk in the Hague, Netherlands. It opens September 4th and runs until November 25th.

I’m very excited to be a part of this exhibition; it’s my first show that’s focused on paper arts at large, and not specifically origami. I’m particularly interested to see what papermakers and paper artists think about my bio-paper. It represents quite a bit of research and work, and I hope they find it as fascinating as I do!

From the press release for the Paper Biennale:

Origami works with sculptural eloquence in two individual styles. (…) A background in technology and a passion for paper are united in the geometrically folded creations of Eric Gjerde. In his most recent work he experiments with paper produced by bacteria.

I will be at the opening September 1st, at the Museum Meermanno, and again at the opening on the 2nd, at the Museum Rijswijk. I look forward to meeting paper artists and friends there! I’m sure it will be a wonderful experience.

See the photo gallery attached to this post to view some of the works I’ve sent in for the exhibition.

Exhibition piece in progress

Published by ericgjerde

I’ve been working on this piece for the last month or so; it’s a huge version of my Dragon Helix design.

I first started folding this pattern years ago, creating a 6 meter long strip of folded paper for it. Sadly it was from Tyvek, which turned out to be too soft to fold properly, and the entire thing was a loss. Ever since then I have wanted to fold it correctly, and realize it in full form.

This work will be on display at the Salon Resonance[s], a large art exhibition in Strasbourg, France on November 9-12 of this year. It will be at least 10 meters long for the exhibition space, potentially longer. I just hope my hands will hold out! It’s been more than a kilometer of creasing done so far.

I enjoy playing with my art while folding; here’s a photo of me that I just had to share with everyone. It seems to be a trend for me these days to always wear my origami on my head…

here is the downloadable crease pattern for the Dragon Helix, in PDF format. As always, licensed with a Creative Commons License!

Gesso piece

Published by ericgjerde

Recently, we’ve been experimenting with traditional gesso – made from rabbit-skin glue and chalk, applied in many thin layers to prepare surfaces for painting. On a whim, my partner Ioana applied it to a test piece I folded from some heavy cardstock. After about 10 layers, it is now one heavy solid piece of matte white surface, which retains all of the fold marks and natural paper crumples.

We’re going to try more of these in the future, but for now I wanted to share this, and show how delightfully the light plays off the matte surface of this work. The final piece is about 1m x 60cm.

Vespertilio – corrugated paper bat

Published by ericgjerde

Vespertilio - by Ioana Stoian

My partner Ioana Stoian recently created this wonderful model of a bat, using origami corrugations – her first origami design!

I’m very pleased with this model and helped her to create a simple set of diagrams and a crease pattern, which you can download via her site:

http://www.ioanastoian.com/2012/pleated-paper-bat/

You can see it also folds flat – the world’s first “flat pack” bat 🙂

Vespertilio - Ioana Stoian

Polish convention diagrams

Published by ericgjerde

I was the guest at the Polish Origami convention a few weeks ago, and I had a fantastic time in Kraków! I heartily recommend to anyone that they should attend this convention; the organizers Krystyna and Wojtek Burczyk did an amazing job putting together a very pleasant origami meeting. Kraków is a beautiful and delightful city with huge nightlife, and I had a blast. And lots of great food too!

For their convention booklet, put together by the gifted Haligami (Halina Rościszewska-Narloch), I submitted six CP patterns. I’m posting them here too, for those who might be interested in checking them out.