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Contributor:
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Babble On. | Login
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Channels: Contemporary ArtExhibitionsRobert Lang
Robert J. Lang, a former physicist and engineer turned artist, whose innovative approach to the traditional art of Origami has earned him a reputation as one of the world's most important Origami artists sits down in IMA’s Nugget Factory to share his knowledge.
I am Robert Lang and the exhibition is Squares-Folds-Life: Contemporary Origami by Robert J. Lang.
The project that brought me here is an origami exhibition and a part of that exhibition is the creation
of a new monumental piece, or actually monumental pieces, large scale origami figures based on local
wildlife; in this case a heron, so I will be folding a large flock of flying herons.
Well it's a fairly long process. I start with the idea of the subject and in this case take the heron because that is the center piece of the installation.
I break down the subject into its component parts; what are the important elements that need to be represented by paper? Because in origami,
you are folding from one uncut square so everything in the subject has to be planned out and mapped into the paper. So I take the heron, for example, and
well, it's got wings, neck, head, tail and an important part of a heron is when they are flying, they trail their feet behind,
so I want to get two long legs coming out of it, as well, and to tell you that it's a heron, rather than say a crane, there is a little tuft on the back of the head.
So that is an important part, actually, of this subject. So I take all those parts and then I am going to represent them by different patterns of crease lines and geometric shapes.
And so I have to figure out how those different patterns fit into a square of paper because what part of the paper becomes a wing, what part becomes a tail,
how much to allocate for a wing, tail and so forth. Once I've found that arrangement, then I can construct all of the crease lines
and that gives me a crease pattern and from that crease pattern, I can fold a shape that we call a base in origami, which is just a geometric shape
that has a flap, a loose bit of paper, for every part of the subject. So there is a leg flap, there is a wing flap; there is even the little crest on the head, a flap for that. From that base, then I can go in...
...once I've folded the base, I can go in and start adding additional folds that will shape the parts of the base. So instead of having a big triangular flap for a leg,
it turns into the long skinny leg with joints and the appropriate thickness for the length and bulges of the joints and so forth.
After doing that folding shaping, then I end up with the finished fold. Since I'm doing a big figure, I'll design and fold it first in small size,
and that's what I did to begin with, and then I'll go back and take the large sheet paper, in this case a six foot square, and fold that giant sheet of paper
into the forefoot wingspan life size herons that will be put on display here.
The herons are made from a custom made sheet of paper, each one from a sheet of paper about six foot square, that's being made by a paper mill in Montreal
that specializes in art papers and has the capability of making very, very large sheets of art paper. This paper will probably be
made from some kind of a blend of cotton and linen fiber.
This project is an evolution of one of the threads of my work. I, kind of, see that
my origami follows several different independent tracks and I'll follow one thread for awhile and then pause and switch over to another.
Different threads are insects, birds, geometrics, computed geometric abstracts, but one of the threads
is to do large scale folding and to do it at an artistic level that's comparable to the small scale folding.
So this is the next stage of evolution of developing large scale artistic origami.
The thing I strive for in almost all of my representational origami, is when the person sees the origami figure,
they get the same emotional reaction that they would have if they saw the actual subject. But at the same time
they are aware what they are looking at is a square of paper and so I want there to be this conflict between their emotional response
and their intellectual knowledge of what it is they are looking at.
I look at two bodies of work to get inspiration; one is I very much look at the works of other origami artists and other wildlife artists,
painters, sculptures and the like and I look to them to see, to learn techniques to see how they've chosen to represent
a particular subject, with strokes of paint or pieces of stone or wood or
folds in paper, for the other origami artists. Then, the other thing I look to for inspiration is the actual subject themselves, working from pictures
if that's all I can get or working from life if I can get access to the real animals to try to see, determine for myself what's important
in the character of the subject. Where are the important lines? And a lot of that you can't even get from pictures, you can see in life the way they cock
their head or the way they move in certain ways is what conveys
the kind of emotional response that inspires a response in yourself and so those are the elements that I look for that I will then try to replicate with folding.
I will take the easy way out. The best film I have seen this year was the movie Enchanted, which we just went to see.
That's because it's about the only film I have seen this year, but it was a pretty good one.
Profoundly unfulfilled! If I weren't an artist, it's hard to even picture that
because even though the short answer to "If I weren't an artist, what would I be?" is would be to say well...I would be physicist because that's what
I was for fifteen years and that's what I still do part-time. Except doing physics well is also something of an art
and people often have this idea that science and art are very, very different, but in fact, although
science follows a particular discipline and that's what makes it a science, but to be successful in science, you actually have to be an artist.
The development of a hypothesis is a very intuitive thing, the Aha...moment of recognition that you
have a theory or you understand what's happening, is very much an artistic event. So even though the short answer would to be say, "Well...I would be back to being a physicist",
I would still be an artist.
I wish I had some profound movie to say. Well, there was this Russian documentary that no one has seen, but it moved me profoundly.....
For goodness sake, buy a tripod. Pretentious video technique. The Blair Witch Project gone awry.
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