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ahead of the curve

THE COLLABORATIVE MIXED-MEDIA WORKS OF ERIK DEMAINE AND MARTIN DEMAINE

Photos courtesy of the Demaines

Erik and Martin Demaine are a father–son artistic partnership whose work has been integral in elevating origami to the status of fine art. Their origami sculptures have been exhibited and collected by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, featured in sculpture magazines, and purchased by several private collectors. Although Martin is a professional artist, Erik is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is one of the world’s leading experts on computational origami and origami mathematics, so his success as a fine artist may seem surprising to some. However, there is much about the origami creations of this father–son team that is unexpected, extraordinary and ahead of the curve in the realm of origami and in art in general. Their artistic collaboration is bi-generational and bi-cultural, their works fuse together art and science and mix media like paper, blown glass and books. And their origami is not angular—it curves.

Martin Demaine (b.1942) studied glass blowing in England and then moved to New Brunswick, Canada, where he established Canada’s first glass blowing studio in the 1970s. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the National Gallery of Canada, and he is currently an artist-in-residence at MIT in Boston. He home schooled his son Erik (b.1981), who completed his BSc degree at fourteen and his PhD at twenty. Erik’s dissertation on computational origami received national awards and won him a MacArthur Fellowship. Since joining the MIT faculty in 2001 as their youngest ever professor, Erik has been the leading theoretician in origami mathematics—the study of what can be done with a folded sheet of paper—and he is exploring origami applications to architecture, robotics and molecular biology.

In the world of origami, the Demaines are best known for their “Curved Crease Sculptures,” dynamic swirling forms created by folding paper along curved creases. Curved paper folding has its origins in the experiments of Bauhaus artists Josef Albers in the 1920s and 1930s and Irene Schawinsky in the 1940s. In the 1970s, artist and computer scientist Ron Resch (1939–2009) and David Huffman (1925–99), an electrical engineer and computational origami pioneer, both experimented with the technique, as did origami artists Thoki Yenn (1919–2004) and Kunihiko Kasahara (b.1941) in the 1980s and 1990s. Martin Demaine had explored curved crease sculpture as early as the 1960s, and in 1998 he and Erik combined their artistic and mathematical knowledge to delve more deeply into the technique. Using mathematical algorithms to probe the potential of curved crease concentric circles, ellipses and parabola, they produced increasingly complex and beautiful folded paper forms.

Over several years, their work evolved into a series of “Curved Crease Sculptures,” in which the artists connect multiple sheets of folded circular paper and then allow the paper to shape itself into a natural equilibrium form, in a type of self-folding origami. According to the Demaines, the title of these modular works “refers to our underlying algorithmic goal of determining the mathematical curved surface that results from different kinds of pleated folding. This kind of ‘self-folding origami’ may have applications to deployable structures that can compress very small by folding tightly and later relax into its natural curved form. To control this process, we must understand what forms result from different pleatings, and how to design pleatings that make desired forms.” Around 2007, the Demaines’ experimentation with curved creases began to attract the attention of contemporary art museums and galleries, a rare but highly significant occurrence for an origami artist. In 2008, their series entitled Computational Origami, folded from ivory-colored elephant hide paper, was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind, and is now in the museum’s permanent collection. The only other origami artist featured in this exhibition was Robert J. Lang.

Since the MoMA exhibition, the Demaines have continued to experiment with curved creases, producing a similar series of five sculptures in elephant hide paper called Waves for an art gallery in Belgium in 2009. Even more lyrical than the Computational Origami series, these sculptures were made from multiple circular sheets of paper with a hole in the center. The sheets, each textured with hand-scored concentric circular creases, were then joined together at a few key points to change the equilibrium form. The following year, the Demaines took the bold step of combining origami and glass in a spectacular mixed-media series that evolved from the Waves series. Their Waves in Glass series examines the communication between folded paper and blown glass, both in process and form. Paper is a material that relies on touch. Glass is untouchable when it is being worked at temperatures of over 2,000° F; glass blowers rely on visual cues to communicate and shape it. To relate the two media, the Demaines originally blew the glass blindfolded, leaving touch as the only way for them to communicate with the material through a thin layer of wet paper. In this series of works, the paper is folded and then inserted into head-shaped glass vessels. Once inside the glass, the folded paper expands to find new equilibrium forms, which could not exist without the communication between the two materials.

Together (from the Kentucky series)

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2012, Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper (Photo by the artists)

Asymmetry

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2015, Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper (Photo by the artists)

Three Waves Meeting

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2009, Zanders elephant hide paper (Photo by the artists)

0264b (from the Earthtone series)

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2012, Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper (Photo by the artists)

Destructors III (from the Destructors series)

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2013, elephant hide paper (Photos by the artists)

Green Tea Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2014, Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper, hand-blown glass (Photo by the artists)

Waves in Glass I (from the Waves in Glass series)

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2010, Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper, hand-blown glass (Photo by the artists)

Velvet Ring

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2015, velvet paper, hand-blown glass (Photo by the artists)

Pinnacle

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2014, Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper, hand-blown glass (Photo by the artists)

Donnie Darko

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2014, elephant hide pape, hand-blown glass (Photo by the artists)

For many of their works over the last few years, the Demaines have experimented with different types and colors of paper to create sculptures that are often highly organic, such as their Green Waterfall series, made in 2011 for the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts using Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper. The two slightly different shades on the front and reverse of the intertwining folded green sheets give the sculptures the rich, lavish tone and texture of tropical plants twisting upward from the floor of a rainforest as they seek out rays of sunlight. In the Stone Series, folded in 2013 for the Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, circles of a similar gray watercolor paper twist and turn boldly to form sculptures that somehow convey the solidity of granite rock.

In 2013, the Demaines also created their Destructors series. These sculptures depart in a new direction artistically from earlier series by combining folded paper with printed text to create a relationship between folded paper sculpture and works of literature. As in their earlier series, the sculptures are modular combinations of three or more interacting sheets of paper, but the sheets were printed with overlapping pages from Graham Greene’s “The Destructors” (1954), the short story that inspired the 2001 film Donnie Darko. To create this series, the artists cut each sheet into a circle with a circular hole, scored centric circular creases and folded the circles by hand, alternating between mountains and valleys. Once the paper had found its natural equilibrium, they “wove” the pieces together by squeezing one piece to fit inside the hole of another. Then, they let the pieces relax into a natural resting state and glued them to prevent shifting. The result is an unreadable book, echoing the central tenet of the story that “destruction after all is a form of creation.”

In their newest series, QR Series (2014–15), readability, this time of computer code, is again distorted, but with a much lighter touch. Circular sheets are printed with a black-and-white QR code pattern that originally read “Folding Error” when the paper was flat. By folding the sheets, they create a beautiful sculpture, but they also destroy the code—and with it the error message. In this clever new series, we can see all the key elements of the Demaines’ extraordinary father–son artistic partnership—aesthetic grace and balance in the swirling design of the sculptures, mathematical and technological sophistication in the printed code pattern and the continued evolution of their curved folding technique, and a wry sense of humor that will ensure the Demaines many more years of creativity to come.

0261c (from the Earthtone series)

Erik and Martin Demaine, USA 2012, Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper (Photo by the artists)

0316-02 (from the Ocean series)

Erik and Martin Demaine, Canada/USA 2012, Canson Mi-Teintes watercolor paper (Photo by the artists)

Martin and Erik Demaine in their studio

(Photo courtesy of the artists)