INTRODUCTION:

The Asian tradition of origami is more than one thousand years old.  During that time it has evolved from an Imperial past-time into a serious art-form and educational tool, embraced by artists and mathematicians alike.

The exhibition Paper-Folding Geniuses, now running at Columbia College's Center for Book & Paper, features work from artists who embrace traditional origami, and those drawn to modern geometric innovations. Producer Tim Carnahan caught up with paper-folders who have become wrapped up in the process.

TAPE:

“Origami” translates to “folding paper.”  Most practitioners follow a series of steps to fold a square of paper into an object, like an animal, or a geometric shape.  Simple designs can have around twenty steps, but more advanced folds can have more than two hundred.

Chicagoan Ty Perez is showing a large paper dragon at the Columbia College exhibition that required more than two hundred and fifty folds. 

PEREZ: “I make large and small, like right here is a tiny origami crane. It’s in a gel pill capsule.”

The crane rolls around the pill cap like a microscopic ship in a bottle. It was folded from a one-centimeter square of paper, smaller than a dime, complete with a beak and wings perfectly folded into place. 

And he can make them tinier.  One at the exhibit was made from a 3 millimeter square, a teeny-weeny dot of paper smaller than a little housefly.  

PEREZ: “A lot of people think I use some kind of tools or magnifying glass.  I just use my hands, nothing else.”

Perez started folding origami when he was four.  Nine years later he carries himself like a serious craftsman.  He’s begun designing his own folds. He carries paper everywhere he goes, and hides packets around the house, squirreled away, just in case.

PEREZ: “It’s kind of just like an artist who carries a sketchbook everywhere. I just love making stuff.  It’s such a free environment with the paper, you can literally do whatever you want.”

SMITH: “Origami is a wonderful discipline because what it does is challenges the human mind to get as much as you can out of very little.  How much can I do with just four sides?”

That’s Bradford Hansen-Smith.  For eighteen years he’s folded paper plates into ornate objects that look like coral, crystals and seashells.  He says every thing he makes comes from the same basic folds.

Origami is basically about manipulating geometry – its math applied to art. And it’s hard to reconcile the rigid structure of the Pythagorean Theorem with spontaneous creativity, but Smith disagrees. 

SMITH: “Geometry is not about these static shapes and forms that are, after awhile, really boring.  It’s about life, movement, about creative, spontaneous creativeness.  This is what life is.”

And the work of experienced folding artists like Smith, or Chris Palmer show there’s more to origami than butterflies.

PALMER:  This is a whole other world than animals.  This is a completely different world.

Palmer’s art blends origami techniques with his study of the tiling patterns you see on castles in Spain, or in the Middle East. 

PALMER: “This is a silk piece that’s hanging and dividing my room.  It has a pattern of lines…”

This piece is an example of those merging styles.  It looks like a mosaic…like small pieces of fabric sewn into an off-kilter tile, but it’s actually one piece. Palmer folds pleats into the fabric.  The lines of pleats intersect to form a tiling pattern. 

PALMER:  “I could express it maybe five different ways by changing the width of the pleats or how far apart the pleats are or how long the pleats run, or how the pleats intersect at the vertex.  So there are all kinds of variations in expressing the same tiling.”

This style is called flat-fold origami, or origami tessellations.  It was developed in the 1960s.  Instead of transforming a whole piece of paper into a single object, artists fold lines onto the surface, and integrate those lines into complicated, but repeating, patterns.

PALMER: “A pattern is kind of like a melody.  And we’re used to hearing very simple songs, like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ but there is a richness of possibility and composition at least visually with repeated patterns that are the equivalent between the higher forms of development in music.”

Palmer sees these patterns represented throughout the world.  Origami has given him a geometric tool to represent those patterns, and to tap into a cosmic order that transcends perceptions, but shapes our lives.  You know, God.

PALMER: “I’m pushing away layers toward some kind of beauty and then beauty is past beauty and then farther and farther and farther and there I know is where God is. I don’t know it exactly and I don’t pretend to have some direct…he doesn’t talk to me or anything like that, but that’s the underlying, for me, activity for all my art.  That it’s for the greater glory of God and to celebrate him and that’s pretty plain, right on my sleeve there.”

For a young folder like Perez, the craft is just starting to wrap him up in the greater mysteries of the cosmos, but is has worked its way into his subconscious.

PEREZ: “There is kind of a zen thing to it. I don’t know. I once had a dream about a five-headed crane and I tried it out and it actually worked.  It is the funnest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

See what other paper artists have dreamed up at The Paper-Folding Geniuses exhibit, currently on display at the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper through August 25th. 

For Chicago Public Radio, I’m Tim Carnahan.