Origami Memory Dress
The Sunday Paper #553
May 4, 2025
This was something fun to receive this week: the recording of my talk at the North American Hand Papermaker’s Conference in Denver last fall, when I spoke about my adventurous life with paper. It was such an honor to be invited to give the Anita Lynn Forgach keynote lecture. Special thanks to the University of Denver Anderson Academic Commons – Kate Crowe, Curator of Special Collections and Archives and the entire Digital Media Services team – for making this possible.
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I recently received my copy of Peter Dahmen’s new book Pop Up Sculptures and a set of pop up cards, and they are so fun to open and close! I purchased them through a kickstarter campaign, and you can still purchase the book and cards. The publisher, Poposition Press, is a small business here in Colorado. I’m lucky to have interviewed the proprietor, Rosston Meyer and the artist, Peter Dahmen, on Paper Talk.
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I am always intrigued by the ways scientists are studying how the properties of various materials can mimic and enhance the ways paper can fold. Research at the University of Michigan modeled how different origami structures made from trapezoidal subunits (i) responded to stresses like compression (ii) and stretching (iii). I have a hunch that an artist (Matt Shlian, who has also been on Paper Talk) influenced some of this research.
Image credit: Adapted from J.P. McInerney et al. Nat. Commun. 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57089-x (Used under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license)
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Wow, my feed is full of cross overs between art, science and engineering this week! Audrey Zhang, an art and archaeology major at Princeton University, created a piece called Origami Memory Dress, which combines tactile art with engineering. Zhang worked alongside Glaucio Paulino, PhD, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the university, and his research team to weave the intricate origami patterns into the garment’s structural design.
Origami Memory Dress; Photo: Audrey Zhang
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Enter your made-from-paper 2D or 3D artwork from May 1 — June 6. The artwork for Paper Made II must be made primarily from paper or a paper product or created using a paper-making process. Juried selections will be featured in the fall 2025 issue of Fiber Art Now and will be eligible for the on-site exhibition at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Fort Wayne, Indiana, November 8, 2025 through February 1, 2026.
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Paper Tidbits
- Have you had a chance to listen to my interview with James Ojascastro on Paper Talk?
- There’s one spot left in my Taos Paper Retreat. We’ll be weaving paper during the week of July 21st in the land of enchantment. Click here to read all about it and join us!
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Author’s Corner
With my new book coming out in November, I thought I’d spend the months leading up to publication sharing a bit about the process of bringing a book to life. Feel free to send me your questions, and I’ll try to address them here. Autographed copies of Weaving With Paper will be available for pre-order from me (along with special bonus content) this summer.
I hope you will have a chance to watch my keynote address (see above). I talked about how I got into writing how-to books, and if do I say so myself, I think it is an interesting story – especially since it wasn’t something I ever dreamed of doing!
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