Origami For Kids

There are different ways to engage and delight a viewer with something you’ve made, for instance, at the level of thought and at the level of feeling; but either way ‘engage’ usually means a mix of being clear and being obscure--both obscure and clear enough to make the viewer figure things out for himself and be able to reach the happy conclusion of recognition. With ‘model-making origami’ this happens almost automatically when the viewer recognizes simultaneously what the object is and that it is just paper with a few folds that the mind has figured out how to read. (So if the model is too detailed or if it is post-painted, we work less at translating it from paper-language and it gives less joy...) This would be a ‘cognitive’ ploy--it works at the level of thought, of recognition. But emotion comes into play in origami too, especially, it seems, with wet-folded models, for reasons I’m far from clear about. A model can be stiff and cold and just say “this-is-a-that”, but it can also ...

Just a few years ago I read some words—either by John Smith or David Lister: one of the ones who can write—to the effect that it’s unlikely origami will ever be used as a means of ‘expressing artistic ideas’. Just what the author thought was impossible or unlikely may not have been precisely spelled out, but it's always been clear that origami imposes severe constraints on creation so that it’s not the first medium you think of if what you are after is self-expression. Even so, it’s always dangerous to prognosticate, and the boundaries of ‘expression’ and ‘idea’ are being pushed back these days too as part of origami’s general advance-on-all-fronts. It seems to me that there are several different concepts embraced by these terms, and that it may be worth unpacking them a little. I. There was and still is an old-fashioned sense of expressiveness in animal origami which was for a long time associated with the name of Yoshizawa, though he’s acquired quite a few heirs and rivals by no...