Paper Dresses

One of my favorite stories from when I was a little girl was how my mother used to “bribe” me to wear a dress to a party or special occasion instead of my favorite orange pants. She promised me that I could put on my orange pants as soon as we got home as long as I wore whatever she wanted me to wear to the party. (Seriously, how DID I fall for that.) The irony is that now I rarely ever wear pants, and nearly always wear dresses. One of my friends once wanted to take a picture of me in every single one of my summer dresses because I seem to have so many of them.

I’ve been experimenting with paper and dresses over the past couple of weeks in anticipation of the upcoming exhibit at PRESS that will feature paper dresses made over the course of the summer. There are three rules to the project.

1.  The dresses must be made from paper.
2. They must include typography.
3. They must explore the tension between freedom and confinement.

But for now, I’m just experimenting, and pulled out some of my favorite paste paper scraps to fold into mini-origami dresses.

Paste paper ready to be folded

I was inspired by a project I made while a grad student in Hedi Kyle’s bookmaking class. She instructed us to choose an origami form and make multiples of them in descending or ascending sizes so they would stack together. I scanned peacock feathers and made this.

I would like my mini-origami paper dresses to some how stack together, but the form doesn’t allow for it to nestle like the peacock shape did. This is my kind of challenge–figuring out how to nestle the dresses to emphasize the change in scale, but to also allow the viewer to see the diverse paste paper patterns–I really like that red one. It looks like we will be creating an exchange project based on these origami dresses. Keep reading this blog or the PRESS blog to find out!