Informal Opportunities: Origami Boxes

About Facilitator

Eliza Axelson-Chidsey is a designer, artist, and curator based in New York City. Her interest in material culture is manifest in explorations of form, value, and ephemerality. Excited by research and concepts, and informed by her senses, she is regularly reminded how much learning is found through doing.

Objective

The Time Being (For Robert Smithson)

By Nancy Holt, 1978

For the time being, in the interim, in the course of time, from day to day, from hour to hour, until, in due time, and in the fullness of time, time endures, goes on, remains, persists, lasts, goes by, elapses, passes, flows, rolls on, flies, slips, slides, and glides by.

Originally published in Arts Magazine 52, no. 9, Special Issue: Robert Smithson (May 1978), 144.

In this three-part workshop, designer and artist Eliza Axelson-Chidsey explores ways to create form for purpose, connecting the line between the structured, academic discipline, and the informal opportunities that we encounter all the time. Using found materials—whether they are naturally occurring or salvaged/repurposed—we’ll extend the same principles of form making.

Starting with a familiar and easy origami pattern for making paper boxes, we will expand, getting larger, looser, and more comfortable creating volume from sheet material with recycled and found materials, such as leaves. 

What's Included

• Materials for box-making

What to Bring

Scissors (optional)

CURRICULUM

Origami is a practice that allows us to think about how flat things become three dimensional. Like when we recycle a box by flattening it and then realize that they all started flat. Paper folding is a meditative practice—it is very satisfying and it’s an interesting, low-stakes way to make and experiment with three-dimensional form. You can prototype something, test ideas, and iterate. Physical repetition like this is meditative to me, like running, swimming, or hiking; once the body goes on autopilot, the mind is released.