Origami Talks
Hey! 👋
Quarantine is boring. So let’s make it fun by talking about origami! This time rather than folding a model, let’s get to know the amazing artist and designer behind the artworks.
Join us on the live conversations with origami artists where they share and talk about their personal journey, stories, and sometimes unconventional ideas about origami.
Next Origami Talks
Sunday Nov 29
9:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm UTC
23. Jeannine Mosely: How Artistic Constraints Can Set You Free!
Dr. Mosely studied Mathematics and EECS at MIT. She worked for 13 years at ICAD, Inc. as a software engineer. She is best known for her large, crowd-sourced origami projects made from folded business cards, like the (original) Business Card Menger Sponge and the Mosely Snowflake Sponge (2012). She is also known for her pioneering curved origami designs
Jeannine will discuss her minimalist aesthetic and explain how applying seemingly arbitrary and ridiculously tight constraints (no more than 4 folds!) can actually open up one’s thinking in a way that expands your horizons.
Sunday Dec 13
9:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm UTC
Darryl is an Australian ceramicist and digital artist, living in London. He divides his time teaching art and technology to Deaf teenagers and designing intricate paper sculptures in his home studio.
Darryl is relatively new to this art-form, however, he has created a large body of kinetic paper sculptures that blur the line between origami and kirigami. He has pioneered and named several new origami techniques, including “skeletal” and “drawstring” origami. He is keen to encourage others to fold and strongly believes in origami as a mindful activity and as a therapy.
Saturday, Nov 21
9:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm UTC
João Charrua never intended to be an origami artist, but people insisted on seeing him as one... so he lined up with them.
To him, origami has to be as pleasurable as enjoying a good meal and as natural as breathing.
His paper sculptures are a journey through the places of his imagination. They are a physical translation of the ideas that inhabit his mind and come from the most different universes with the most diverse influences.
João Charrua will tell how he got stuck into the papers and talk a bit about inspiration, creativity and his design/creation process.
Saturday, Oct 31
8:00 am PDT | 11:00 pm EDT | 3:00 pm GMT
Jason Ku is an origami artist, designer, and engineer. After working on folding-related research at MIT for over 10 years, he now teaches at the National University of Singapore. Ku is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors for OrigamiUSA.
Jason will be talking about his origami design process. Design
is an immensely difficult task, especially when the space of possible designs is
large. Often constraining the design space not only helps a designer solve
problems, but can also help one establish a consistent design style.
Upcoming Artists
Past Events
Meenakshi Mukerji (Adhikari) was introduced to origami in early childhood. She rediscovered origami in its modular form as an adult quite by chance in 1995. This newfound mathematical and structural side of the art rekindled her passion for origami, and soon she started designing and displaying origami on her popular website www.origamee.net. The website features colorful photo galleries and links to a myriads of free diagrams and has had millions of hits to date.
Event ended on Oct, 18
Tom Hull, an Associate Professor of mathematics at Western New England University, is considered a leading expert on origami mathematics as well as an accomplished paper folder.
In this session: Tom will describe his journey learning origami, learning math, and then learning both at the same time. This story spans the 1980s, when very few people were studying the mathematics of origami, to now, where origami math and its applications are hot topics in engineering and physics. He will also try to describe how he views studying and creating mathematics as very similar to studying and creating origami art. In fact, maybe they are the same thing.
Event ended on Oct, 4
Oriol Esteve started to design origami models in 2014, with the OAS group (Origami Always Succeed) in Barcelona.
He strongly believes in the social dimension of origami and likes to fold in bars and public places.
Most part of his designs are focused on animals, where expressiveness is more important than realism. Traditional origami and the action models also play a big role in his creations. Few shaping and clear lines and edges are a characteristic of his work.
In this session he will talk about designing origami, Inspiration, focusing on process rather than result and much more!
Event ended on Sep, 21
Dáša loves geometry, which is the most characteristic feature in her creations. Her models include stars, flowers, boxes, tessellations and knotology polyhedra. As a teacher she is also very interested in ways how to use origami in education for better and deeper understanding of geometry.
In this session she will talk about the constant search for beauty hidden in paper - Beauty of form, color combinations, folding sequence, geometry lying behind it, How having a bad memory can actually help you create new models!
Event ended on Sep, 13
Origami tends to be admired for the technical skills it implies rather than as an art form. Let‘s face it, while the expression“origami artist“ is frequently used and abused, paper folding is seldom practiced as an actual medium for expression - worse, there is often not even an attempt to make it interesting for the non-initiated. David will highlight the various techniques he uses to come closer to his artistic ideal and show/discuss some examples of what worked and what did not.
Event ended on Sep, 6
Valleyfolder (Peter Keller) is a mathematician with a strong passion for modular origami carpets and tessellations since about 2006. In his work he combines a passion for colour and abstract art with the means of origami to explore the possibilities of this ancient fibre art.
In recent years he has taken to larger scale modular carpets and began using origami tessellations as a canvas for acrylic painting in the optical art and pixelism style.
Event ended on Aug, 29
Madonna Yoder first discovered origami research and conventions while studying geology at MIT. After taking Erik Demaine’s Geometric Folding Algorithms class and developing a method for folding triangular grid mazes she started reverse engineering tessellations and eventually designed her own.
In this session we will discuss how folded (paper) tessellations are both the same as and different from smocked (fabric) tessellations, and how each technique informs the other. We’ll have a quick demonstration of the North American Smocking technique, and discuss why she thinks of myself as an entrepreneur first instead of an artist.
Event ended on Aug, 15
David Brill was introduced to origami when he learned the traditional flapping bird as a 5 year old in the early '50s. He joined the British Origami Society in 1974, and met many other enthusiasts who encouraged him to develop his own designs. He was BOS Chairman from 1995 to 2004. His book Brilliant Origami was published in 1996 and sold more than 25000 copies before going out of print 10 years later.
Dave loves stories - about the origami creative process, about meetings with origami personalities, about the evolution of a particular design, about influences to and from other areas of life... etc. Join us to hear some of his stories, and maybe to contribute some of your own.
Event ended on Aug, 9
Paul Has suffered for his art …and now, he says, it's your turn! In his 35-years as a professional origami 'something' (artist, writer, teacher, designer) he has always striven to push back the boundaries, to do the unexpected, to step outside his comfort zone, to not be part of a mainstream.
In this session we will discuss origami as art, as non-art, as a 'doing or viewing' activity, as a thread of visual literacy in design education …and much more. Paul will give his tips for starting out, developing a voice, making a living and making wonderful baked beans on toast.
Event ended on Aug, 1
Peter Engel has been creating original origami designs for over four decades. His work is inspired by the patterns of nature, the forms of music, traditional handicrafts, and Eastern philosophy and aesthetics, among many other influences.
In this session, Peter will talk about the evolution of his artistic process and his current design work, which focuses on the metamorphosis of forms. He will describe how he designed and constructed a recently-completed permanent installation in San Francisco of an origami bird mobile and his “theme and variations” approach to designing over ten thousand different bird species.
Event ended on Jul, 26
Ekaterina Lukasheva has a passion for mathematics and art. These two passions give birth to the art she creates. Her geometric tessellations are created from flat sheets of paper, incarnating the transformation of flat and plain surface to complex and structured object.
In this session Kate We will talk about inspiration and approaches to origami design. We will also get a chance to look into the artist's studio
Event ended on Jul, 18
Brooklyn-based polymath Robby Kraft currently teaches coding to artists and designers at Parsons, NYU, and the School for Poetic Computation.
During the session Robby will share his thoughts and approach to origami design. This includes tools he uses, fabrication machines, and how code is used in design. Robby will broadcast from his bedroom studio in Brooklyn where paper-preparation, fabrication, folding, coding, and photography all take place. We can look through notebooks, sift through boxes of failed experiments and curved creases, and converse about the limitations of origami.
Event ended on Jul, 12
Kamikyodai (Ricardo Hinojosa) is an artist from Monterrey, Mexico. He is interested in patterns and spatial forms. On a hunch he went to Spain to learn about Islamic Patterns and found enormous opportunity as he perfected the ability to transform traditional geometrical construction instructions into lines on paper.
Event ended on Jul, 4
Ben Parker is a Connecticut-based origami artist who focuses on geometric explorations, mostly pleat patterns and corrugations.
Ben will go over various aspects of his art career, the way he works, and how he gets art shows. He will also show some of the things he's experimented with, and several projects that are in the works currently
Event ended on Jun, 28
Cristian is a 31 years old artist from a minuscule town in Romania. He does not have any formal training in art, but have always had an inclination towards expressin himself creatively. This led him to start a very personal project in 2015 to deal with his then depression in a constructive and creative way. In this session he will talk to us about his personal journey and thousands of cranse he made.
Event ended on Jun, 20
Robert J. Lang has been folding origami for over 50 years and is now recognized as one of the world’s leading masters of the art, with over 800 designs. He is noted for designs of great detail and realism. His work combines aspects of the Western school of mathematical origami design with the Eastern emphasis upon line and form to yield work that is distinctive, elegant, and challenging to fold.
Event ended on Jun, 14
Evan will explain the process involved in creating origami tutorials from start to finish. He will discuss the benefits and challenges of teaching origami online, as well as the lessons he has learned in doing so for the past 12 years. He will also give some insight into his design process by sharing some of his original fractal, spiral, and recursive designs.
Event ended on Jun, 7
Joseph talks about lessons and experiences gained while doing origami for over 45 years. We are going to chat with Joseph about doing commercial origami works, origami as fine art and the personal journey of battling ADHD and depression with origami. A look inside the life of yet another origami "character".
Event ended on Sunday, May 31
Noah Deledda creates something unique out of an ordinary object. We are going to talk with Noah about his unique style of art, How he patiently goes through a process of scratching, denting and creasing aluminum cans with his thumbs. Noah also gives us a real-time live demonstration on how he makes his amazing artworks.
Event ended on Sunday, May 24
Beth has been folding origami since she was 8 years old, and began designing her own models in 2010. She likes to design figurative models with a geometric, sculptural aesthetic.
Beth is going to show us her amazing studio, Talk about her approach in design while showing us some of her sketches in origami, and the techniques and designs she is working on.
Event ended on Sunday, May 17