The City of Brotherly [and Sisterly] Love
[cont’d]
FRIDAY
None of us needed our ‘Morning Joe’ when faced with the hyperkinetic Isabel Uria, Friday’s first speaker. To say she is a “wake up call” is an understatement. From the “crab within a crab” business cards she makes by the dozens and freely distributes to her imaginative paper creations large and small, we were thoroughly wrapped around Isabel’s frenetic fingers. Her talk “Play/Create/Share” summed up her approach to paper engineering. Kyle took one end of her paper slinky to expand it the several feet of its length. Isabel then showed us images of the elaborate entryway, spider web-like structures she created—it took her 3 months!—for the Louie Awards. This was a fine example of her taking “simple structures and then adding more paper to make them more complicated.” Another example was her laser-cut, lace-like MFA thesis. Incorporated into the structure were names and details relating to her world at Maryland Institute College of art (MICA).*
Freelancing after graduating MICA, Isabel started working for Structural Graphics. Her first week on the job, when everyone considered her a trainee, she created a dragon whose tongue would move when tweaking its nostrils. MBS members gasped at its movement. What’s next for Isabel? Working with packaging. Combining her love of the versatility of paper, surprises, and sugar, our attention was turned to objects on our tables. Oh, if I only could properly describe the surprises. There were paper pyramids in which we found delicious chocolates and banana chips! Then we were instructed to open the white boxes, 8 connected boxes acting as flexagons. Hidden within the boxes were other boxes. Inside was an apple! What creativity! What playfulness! Isabel ended by asking us to help ourselves to her crab cards. She certainly Plays and Shares her creations.
Robin Sutton’s calm, quiet presentation helped us settle down. In 2010 in Chicago, Robin spoke to us about how she repairs our books and ephemera, a form of magic she makes using her extensive digital archive, VERY fine motor skills, and tiny instruments. Not to mention unending patience. Today, she was calling our attention to the materials added to books to give them more pizazz and “popability,” namely thread, cloth, and string.
She began by showing Apianus’ Astronomicum Ceasareum (1540) with volvelles affixed with string. Thomas Malton’s Treatise of Perspective uses string to make the geometric figures pop-up. Robin uses a beading needle to repair the Biedermeier cards with string activation. These are the smallest objects she works on.
Next was a Jacob’s ladder, with linen tapes, and a paper “spider web” with a printed beehive on the base page, and a “toilette” book with ribbon for hinges on the flaps. The Dean’s series, with ribbon to lift the pop-up scene, rarely has the original ribbons, since metal eyelets usually tear them. The earliest Deans had no rivets but used string. The Speaking Books used cords pulled by ivory pods. She replaces the missing ivory with a polymer. Of course, Kubašta used ribbon for Marco Polo’s elephants and string for the Christopher Columbus pop-up of the Santa Maria. Robin concluded by saying she finds the use of all these materials “magical” and hopes MBS members will alert her to others materials in their collection. Robin always ends her talks with an image of Vermont, where she lives and works. This time her husband chose the image, a 1959 Jaguar! No strings attached.
Somehow it didn’t shock me that Yevgeniya [Yev, jen’ ya] Yeretskaya has the title, Director of Paper Engineering, at Up With Paper. From her close second for the 2012 Meggendorfer Prize for Snowflake to her recent book, The Snow Queen, nothing less would be expected of her, despite her youthful appearance. Yevgeniya told us of growing up in the Ukraine and her first pop-up book at three years old, Kubašta’s Sleeping Beauty in Czech. It had a“profound effect” on her, especially where the Prince kisses Sleeping Beauty. She emphasized that when she created The Snow Queen, one spread had to mimic that pull-tab kiss. Yet she continued to aspire to be a ballerina and went to New York’s Music and Art High School. http://www.yaypapercuts.com
Yevgeniya attended Pratt, majoring in communication and design. She has never before shared the pop-ups she created there. Her first pop-up was a house with individual rooms, an “unfolding structure.” It was recommended she take the pop-up class with Robert Sabuda but when she enrolled, she had another teacher. Yevgeniya’s obsession with fairies had her include them in her first pop-up. When she began an internship with the Robert Sabuda studio, it “really sealed my fate” in wanting to be a paper engineer and focusing on children’s books. She showed us her Senior Project, which is an approx. 4-foot long pop-up panorama of fairies done with ink on paper, watercolor, and gouache. Another project was a series of pop-ups based on the Hans Christian Andersen tales.
Talking about her work now, Yevgeniya said, “you don’t get to work in the field you love except if you’re lucky.” After freelancing for a time using “guesswork and intuition,” Yevgeniya landed a job at Up With Paper and has “never been bored.” She has “learned from all the talented people” around her.
She concluded by demonstrating the unique ability of pop-ups to teach. For a TED talk on tectonic plates, Yevgeniya created a pop-up book called, The Moving Earth.The book proves the point I’ve always stressed, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a pop-up is worth a million.” Watch it and learn! Thank you, Yevgeniya!
Three paper engineers share the last hour before lunch. First is Shelby Arnold who, after graduating Pratt Institute in 2007, went to work in the Sabuda studio, where she is today. Shelby power-packs her pop-ups with electronics. As a member of a hackerspace, NYC Resistor in Brooklyn, NY, Shelby adds to her pop-up cards, books, and artist books, really cool adjuncts that light up, give sound, and create a larger environment. Shelby demonstrated some of her creations, especially the very simple but effective Tree Lights, laser cut paper wrapped around LED candles. http://www.shelbymakes.com/
Shelby used crowd-funding to offset the cost of printing 1000 copies of her pop-up concertina. It has minute graphic details, and because the pop-ups are in the folds, there is a lot of “inter-dimensional and interactive connections.” I saw her working on the concertina in Portland and was mesmerized by the fine line work. Like an Easter Egg, Shelby included her studio with its desk and lamp in the illustrations.
Shelby also worked on a set design for a friend’s abstract play involving math, space, and time. She worked out shapes as wormholes, parabolic curves, and the like. Holy Abstraction!!! In conjunction with Jie Qui of MIT [2012 conference*], Shelby was asked to make a self-typing typewriter for a haunted house called, “Sleep No More,” based on Macbeth. In her latest project, Shelby contributes to an on-going YouTube series called, Doctor Puppet, all done with stop-action motion.* Busy Lady, our Shelby.
Simon Arizre, also working in Sabuda’s studio, shared with us his personal “predator vs. prey” hexaflexagon, a unique way to tell a story. Kyle had introduced Simon to the format 6 years ago. In Simon’s device, a bear pounces on an unsuspecting fish. A spectacularly visual new project, Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings is an Iranian folktale akin to The Arabian Nights. Working with an illustrator and attempting to “show more about Iran than its politics,” Simon used some effective paper engineering techniques, like a pop-up of the Prince that opens his eyes when popping up. Simon learned this technique from Andy Baron. The colors of the book are quite exotic.
Simon has been asked to make a pop-up book of a new Australian film “that scared Sundance.” In the film, The Babadook, the evil character is a pop-up book, and Simon will be turning it into a limited edition to be released this Fall. He refused to show us the trailer for the movie saying, “it’s much too scary.” Can’t wait to be terrified by the book.*
Well, Becca Zerkin brought her kindergarten teacher’s voice to calm us from the Babadook. Thank Heavens! Her talk, “Full STEAM Ahead: How Pop-ups Make Kids Smarter,” relates to education’s STEM plan: S-Science, T-Technology, E-Engineering, M-Mathematics; STEAM adds the A for Arts. Becca left the kindergarten to follow her dream of being a paper engineer and now works for Matthew Reinhart, in addition to freelancing for Up With Paper, is a guest instructor at Cooper Union, and a visiting artist in schools. As a teacher, she promotes activities where, when one applies knowledge, you can “see” it in action. In her workshops in NYC schools, Becca tries to make students “let go of the idea that abstract art has to be something.” She showed them David Carter’s White Noise as an example of abstraction. http://www.beccazerkin.com
With plain paper and no crayons, Becca had the children experiment with the properties of paper. As they work, she uses mathematical terms they can relate to their projects, in effect, “pulling out” from them the math terms. In the older grades, Becca introduces physics pointing out the angles, fulcra, load, and levers, again, as they pertain to their paper projects. With The Canterbury Tales, students learned the story by creating pop-ups. She finds using movables is a perfect way to make math relevant. Currently, Becca is working with a math specialist to investigate using pop-ups in the CORE curriculum to help understand math concepts and forge full STEAM ahead.
[Look for the asterisk * for additional links to videos and websites at the end of this article.]
