From Paper to Porcelain: The Art of the Fold

My degree dissertation was called The Art of the Fold. It examined folding through materials — from paper to space, from craft to art form. This is where that inquiry led.

​I have been folding paper since childhood. Not as a discipline, not as a practice — just as something my hands did. The crease, the geometry, the way a flat sheet could become a form with weight and shadow. It stayed with me.

Upper half of my degree dissertation front cover, 2019

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Two views of my degree 'studio'

When I returned to university in my late forties, studying 3D Contemporary Craft, the question became: what happens when the fold doesn't unfold? Paper is temporary. A crease can always be reversed. But porcelain remembers everything — every pressure, every plane, every shadow caught in the fold at the moment it was made.

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That is where my practice began. Not with clay, exactly, but with the fold itself — the impulse to fix something transient into something permanent. Press-moulding porcelain onto folded structures translates the geometry of paper into a medium that holds it for good. A fold fixed in time.

The connection to origami runs through everything I make — the asymmetry, the play of light across angled planes, the way negative space is as present as the form itself. It is also why this blog exists. Origami is a language spoken across disciplines: architecture, fashion, engineering, art. I find it everywhere, and I keep returning to it.
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The posts here are an extension of that curiosity — a record of where folding goes when it leaves paper behind.