Manipulating paper

‘When you fold, there’s a kind of simple elegance that’s not contrived,’ says origami master Paul Jackson.

By DAVID STROMBERG
A figure by Vietnamese artist Giang Dinh. (photo credit: Courtesy)
A figure by Vietnamese artist Giang Dinh.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Paul Jackson, one of the world’s leading figures in origami, did not set out to be a paper artist.
As a student, he focused on fine arts; his origami work had never been anything more than a hobby he’d pursued since childhood. But one event during his art studies led him to commit his life to the art of paper-folding.
“I showed my origami works to a professor, a famous sir who was a friend of the queen’s, and who was also an artist,” recalls the 58-year-old Jackson, who has curated the “International Exhibition of Contemporary Paper Art” opening at the Old Jaffa Museum next Tuesday.
“[The professor] said they had no relevance or context and that paper-folding was a Japanese folk art. And he knocked them off the table onto the floor. I thank him every day.”
Jackson received his undergraduate at the Coventry School of Art and Design, and his master’s at the Slade School of Fine Art – two of the best-known art institutions in the world. Both schools imbued his art practice with a combination of rigorous thinking and experimental risk-taking.
However, he realized that the contemporary art world had a limited audience that went to art galleries, whereas with origami, no matter who saw it – mathematicians, children, grandmothers, educators – everyone seemed to view it as fun and interesting. People weren’t dismissive in the way that his art professor had been. And he also understood that as a hobby, it had already become part of his work – teaching him to set up rules and then occasionally break them.
“I turned my back on galleries, scholarships, travel grants,” he says, “on sleeping with the right gallery owner in order to get a show. Like raw meat being prepared for the system.”
Jackson’s hobby didn’t have a very large audience, either, though; the British Origami Society was just a few people sitting in a room making models.
“It wasn’t particularly art, and it wasn’t beautiful, but it was ingenious,” he says.
He left Slade in 1981 – a difficult time in England, with riots and unemployment – and wrote letters to every design course around London, offering a threeday paper-folding seminar. And he got a lot of work that way. While his friends, who were painters and sculptors, were starving, he had so many offers for parttime work that he had to turn some away.
At first he showed how to make models like elephants and flowers – which the design students loved. But it took him some time to understand that he should be teaching them something else: how to fold. Folding involved patterns, repetition, manipulation, structure, flexibility – all elements that were important to design. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Jackson continued to develop his course on folding, teaching at over 50 colleges in England and Europe, making contacts and creating his own folding techniques. When he later learned that painter Josef Albers, known for his color theory, had taught a paper-folding course at the Bauhaus school in Germany, he suddenly felt connected to a tradition.
More than 30 years have passed, and in addition to teaching across Europe, the US and Asia, Jackson has authored over 30 books on paper art – including a 2011 reference handbook called Folding Techniques for Designers: From Sheet to Form, which quickly became a standard for designers.
His larger mission is to disseminate the knowledge he has accrued in more than three decades of paper manipulation within the design world. The origami techniques that people learn as children are good for making models, but designers are looking for something more complex. And since leaving Slade, Jackson has been developing folding techniques that go beyond making legs or faces. One of these is crumpling, which involves crumpling and opening paper to create something more elastic than straight folding.
“When I started out, the idea of folding in design was a crazy idea,” he says. “Now, 30 years later, there’s a huge amount of folding in the design world. It’s become an established language to manipulate fabric, plastic, cardboard. Even wood and metal can be fabricated to have folds in them. It’s become a crucial design language for people all over the world. I can’t take credit for that, [but] I’m no longer some crazy guy touring around teaching folding. I kind of feel vindicated.”
IN 2000, he moved to Israel to be with Miri Golan, who founded the Israeli Origami Center (IOC) in 1992. They are now married with a 12-year-old child, and they are working together on the exhibit at the Old Jaffa Museum.
Golan applies her knowledge and experience with origami in the educational and behavioral fields. She worked in a school for children with emotional problems for 20 years and used origami as a therapeutic tool.
“I have an expression,” she says. “When the paper folds, your emotion unfolds.”
She noticed that after she folded with the children in silence for some time, they eventually became comfortable enough to talk about issues that bothered them. She attributes this to the calming, slowing and centering affect of origami.
She has also developed the use of origami in teaching mathematics, especially geometry, with a program called “Origametria,” which she designed together with Jackson. The Education Ministry approved the program in 2008, and since then, Golan has been teaching the method to geometry teachers in Israeli kindergartens and elementary schools.
The IOC also publishes origami books, including in Hebrew and Arabic, and organizes conferences and conventions that bring origami artists to the country from all over the world.
For the exhibition, the IOC and the Old Jaffa Museum have come together to bring works by 22 internationally known paper artists to Israel, and develop a workshop program for families – children and adults alike – to practice paper techniques such as folding, cutting and crumpling. On Saturdays and holidays between Passover and the end of August, there will be a paper artist leading workshops in a space prepared for this purpose. The rest of the time, there will be large projections of videos, allowing museum visitors to practice some paper manipulation on their own.
The central space will exhibit works by Vincent Floderer, the world’s leading practitioner of paper crumpling, who creates works with a natural and organic look – as if they were grown on trees – but that also have a specific geometric structure.
There will also be a space with installations of large paper pieces with a single fold. These works, says Jackson, use a vocabulary of beautiful forms. Unlike most works, which are made of a sequence of folds, they appear as a folded “event” where the artist either gets it right or doesn’t – something Jackson says makes them somewhat Zen.
“One of the fascinating things about folding paper,” he notes, “is that it’s a meeting point between mathematics and art. Because when you manipulate a sheet of material, you can plot it out, describe it mathematically. You don’t need the knowledge to do it, but it’s there. It’s also interesting to people who like the ingenuity of how shapes are worked out mathematically. I sometimes have a problem with mathematicians who make art. But when artists make art with a little math, it has more beauty and depth.”
When visitors put their own hands to use in manipulating paper in the exhibition’s workshop space, the effects go beyond the simply making a model or pattern.
“We’re told that we have a left brain and a right brain, and that the left side is logical while the right side is creative,” explains Jackson. “And each side of the brain controls the hand on the opposite side of the body. In folding, both hands work together, equally, in concert. When you fold, your whole brain works.”
Another important aspect of folding, he says, is that one’s fingers directly touch the manipulated material, whereas many other creative endeavors entail using tools such as pens, brushes or hammers. Making something directly with the hands has a powerful psychological effect, he says.
“You feel down or melancholy, and then you make even a simple swan, and you feel a kind of ‘wow,’ which is a very big release for people. If you’re clinically depressed, it’s often because the two sides of the brain have a schism, they’re not working together. By folding, they have to work together, they have to be in contact, to cooperate. There’s a whole body of research that suggests it eases pressure on the brain.”
This is just one aspect of what makes such a seemingly trivial activity as cutting and folding so amazing to Jackson.
The techniques can be applied in art, design, education, therapy – and they are now increasingly being applied in the medical profession. In the US, universities are receiving grants in the tens of millions of dollars to research connections between folding and the science and engineering fields.
These include external fields such as astronomy, but also organic processes such as growing artificial livers. When proteins fold, they have to do so properly, or else there will be disease. Scientists researching protein-folding work a lot with origami, and there is a professor in Montreal who includes origami in his protein-folding course.
But Jackson also feels that there’s something more basic that makes manipulating paper special.
“When you fold, there’s a kind of simple elegance that’s not contrived,” he says. “It’s satisfying and gives you a relationship that’s your own. The most beginning students can make simple folds, beautiful structures, with this logic, even though they might not like math. Anybody of any age, culture or background can see paper art, and it will speak to them. That’s really its power – mathematical, emotional, conceptual – and it’s something you don’t really expect.”
He feels that paper artists are like alchemists.
Usually paper is a subservient material – people write on it, wrap things with it, use it and touch it all the time – but in paper art, the servant becomes the master. Paper artists, he says, make something beautiful from something almost invisible.
“People are astounded when you make something significant out of this material,” he observes. “This transformation is in the creativity of the artist.
The vision and the technique – which is what art is about.”