From Paper to Porcelain: Artists Making the Leap

The fold is an ancient impulse. But what happens when artists decide paper isn't permanent enough? What happens when they want the crease to last? Here are artists who have made the journey from origami to porcelain, each in a completely different way.

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Image © Hitomi Igarashi, all rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist via hitomiigarashi.wixsite.com.

Hitomi Igarashi found an elegantly simple answer to the translation problem: don't translate at all. She folds traditional Japanese washi paper into origami forms, uses them directly as casting moulds, then lets the kiln burn the paper away, leaving only the porcelain shell behind. The result is something caught mid-transformation, hard when you touch it but looking for all the world like it might still unfold.​
hitomiigarashi.wixsite.com 
Instagram @iihitomi

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Moij Design, the Hamburg duo Angelina Erhorn and Stine Paeper, work at one remove from the material. They fold paper, press it into plaster, and pour porcelain into the resulting mould. The paper disappears in the process, but its memory stays: every surface carries the ghost of a crease. There's something almost archival about it, as if they're preserving a gesture that was always meant to be temporary.
Etsy 
​Instagram @moijdesign

Image © Moij Design / Angelina Erhorn, all rights reserved. Via Colossal.

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Ann Van Hoey, Geometric Study. Image © Ann Van Hoey, all rights reserved. Via JTW Ceramics.

Ann Van Hoey works by hand, folding thin sheets of clay directly, but she begins with mathematics. Each bowl starts as an equation: relationships between squares, triangles and straight lines worked out before she touches any clay. She came to ceramics relatively late, after a career in economics, and you can feel that precision in the work. A visit to Japan lit the spark; the geometry was always already there.
annvanhoey-ceramics.be 
Instagram @annvanhoey

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Mark Goudy starts not with clay but with code. The Berkeley-based ceramicist runs each form through algorithmic 3D software before it ever touches a kiln, generating folds shaped with elliptic, parabolic, sine and cosine curves, then slip-casting them in paper-thin black or white porcelain. What strikes me most is the physics of it: each piece is engineered to find its own resting point, balancing on its folded edge without any other support. The fold isn't decorative. It's the whole reason the object can stand at all.
markgoudy.com 
Instagram @mark_goudy

Image © Mark Goudy, all rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist via Colossal.

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Image © Saori Matsushita, all rights reserved. Courtesy of the artist via Colossal.

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Saori Matsushita approaches the question from a completely different direction. The Seattle-based, Japanese-born artist trained in sculpture and works in Nerikomi (layering coloured clay), but she treats the porcelain sheet exactly the way you'd treat paper: folding it into planes, envelopes, pages torn from notebooks. The trompe l'oeil quality is quietly disarming. You keep looking because your eyes insist it isn't ceramic.
saorimstoneware.com 
​Instagram @saorimstoneware

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What connects them all is the same question I keep returning to in my own work: what does a fold mean when it can no longer be undone?