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Paper Work

An origami career unfolds  An origami career unfolds To a master paper folder, this magazine is far more than the sum of its pages. It could be a herd of cattle, a pack of wolves, a flock of butterflies—the latter, in the words of Richard Alexander '75, symbolizing the "dissemination of ideas and beauty." Alexander […]

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An origami career unfolds
 

An origami career unfolds

To a master paper folder, this magazine is far more than the sum of its pages. It could be a herd of cattle, a pack of wolves, a flock of butterflies—the latter, in the words of Richard Alexander '75, symbolizing the "dissemination of ideas and beauty." Alexander is co-founder of Origamido Studio, a teaching and resource center, gallery, and production facility for fine and decorative arts. Founded in 1996, the studio is largely known for the high-quality paper it makes for master folders around the world, and for its installations and exhibitions.

The studio is on the cutting edge—pardon the pun—of a centuries-old craft suddenly in vogue. In addition to its popularity among hobbyists, origami offers insights into other fields—for example, showing biologists and engineers novel ways to map how proteins fold from random coils into three-dimensional structures.

aligator 

Alexander serves as front man for the business, which recently moved to Hawaii from Massachusetts; his business and life partner, Michael LaFosse, is its creative mind. But Alexander is no slouch when it comes to paper-folding. At two presentations in Ithaca in November, he displayed a seventeen-inch-long alligator fashioned from a single six-foot-by-six-foot sheet of paper. He says he started the piece and "was somewhere around 500 folds into the design when Michael jumped in."

Alexander's visit was sponsored by Guerrilla Griots, an Ithaca-based human rights and media arts center. In addition to the alligator, Alexander brought a trunkload of materials published by his company—mostly instructional books and DVDs—and a pile of do-it-yourself paper dogs he uses to engage audiences in participatory paper-folding. He gave demonstrations at a downtown bookstore and, at a local community center, presented a PBS documentary on origami called "Between the Folds."

Richard Alexander 

A native of Dryden, Alexander comes back to the area regularly to visit family. He credits his sixth-grade teacher with inspiring an early interest in paper-folding. "She used quite a bit of origami in her teaching," he says. "It was empowering to make a bird or a box or a cup out of a plain piece of paper." At Cornell, Alexander majored in systems biology (he studied enzyme activation in little brown bats) and went on to a career as a certified hazardous materials manager. Until 1988—when he met LaFosse, then working as a chef in a Boston restaurant—he hadn't so much as folded a paper airplane. "I was curious about some items I saw lying around his apartment—paper insects, kangaroos," Alexander recalls. "Then he pulled a bunch of shoeboxes from a closet and showed me pieces designed with a depth of realism I'd never seen in my life. I said, 'Why are these in a box? They belong in a museum.'"

— Franklin Crawford

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