FLORIGAMI IN THE GARDEN traveling exhibition
Limited Edition of 3
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Up to one year to produce
In the centuries-long history of origami around the world, one person has transformed the art like no one else. Building on the foundation of ancient folding techniques, Robert J. Lang has applied mathematical brilliance and computer programming skills not only to achieve extraordinary detail and beauty in origami animals and insects, but also to offer others a tool for creating their own complex, original designs.
In the 1990s Lang developed design techniques now called “circle packing” and wrote a computer program called TreeMaker based on those techniques. Then he generously gave both the techniques and the program to the world (the latter as open-source software). Circle packing enables artists to generate crease patterns for origami forms that might otherwise be too complicated to formulate just using the artist’s intuition. The first piece Lang produced using TreeMaker was a stag, like the handsome animal and his family in Dear Family. Each deer, including the buck with multi-pronged antlers, was folded from a single uncut sheet of paper.
When circle packing—which was also discovered by a Japanese artist named Toshiyuki Meguro at about the same time—hit the origami world, it spurred what became known as the “bug wars,” ingenious attempts to create ever-more-complicated, fanciful designs, generally of insects with multiple legs, antennae, and wings. “The concepts in Dr. Lang’s software were a key,” Box says. “People ran with it, enabling their own creativity to blossom.” Over the years Lang and others worked out how to combine the concepts of circle packing with design techniques using a square grid instead of circles. This hybrid approach is much easier to work with and has almost entirely displaced circle packing. Lang redesigned the buck for this collaboration using the new approach which is now referred to as “box pleating.”
Dear Family is “a celebration of what can be achieved in origami—the remarkable detail that’s available with an uncut square,” Box says. In another layer of meaning, an all-white animal is mythologically associated with purity and mystery. “The sacred white stag is the archetype of light,” Box says. As a life-size grouping, Dear Family also represents the transcendent symbol of family.
