I found a book about origami when cleaning my bookcases the other week. I’m not exactly sure where it came from, but there was a packet of origami paper tucked inside, so I decided to try my hand at it.
This is my favorite creation, a fox and a book, based off a fox and a book on my one bookcase:
That was my third attempt at the book. I credit its success to using orange paper, since the first two failed books were in gray. I made them in part for the Carson class, since our homework one night was to pick a place and respond to it. I decided to respond to The Orange Wall, what we call my home (it has an orange wall in the living room).
After we presented our places, we were paired up to combine our two places to form a third place. I was paired with Barbara Henry, who had written a poem in response to the Irish Hunger Memorial next to Poets House. Barbara taught my letterpress class at the Center for Book Arts a couple summers ago, so it was fun to work with her again.
Here’s a picture of the memorial from the window of our seminar room:
I was struck by the folds in the stone, and since I had an extra sheet of origami paper, I decided to just randomly make folds in response to what I saw. We then added lines from Barbara’s poem to the different surfaces. It was fun to see the poem transform as it was inscribed on an object, and how the object transformed after I read the text Barbara added (I made some additional folds in response the the words). The orange color also suddenly took on political significance as one of the colors of the Irish flag.
Here are some pics. My folds are a bit haphazard since I was just folding at random.
