Christiane Bettens
Freelance artistcbettens@virga.org
http://origami-art.org
"My art is origami (folded paper, no cut, no glue). Since I'm focusing on geometrical stuff like tessellations and boxes, I'm doing maths at an intuitive level, by folding only, without using tools or computer. My inspiration comes from patterns on church floors, mosque ceilings, flowers in my garden. I'm not trying to duplicate these things with paper, I prefer a symbolic representation. I'm providing people with an open poetic material, which they can build their own interpretation on. A kind of visual haiku."
“ Aller/retour (means roundtrip in French) ”
2007, One square of elephant hide paper, 20 x 25 cm
Origami tessellation : a triangular grid is folded all over the sheet, then a set of pleats figuring a bird is repeated according to a linear pattern. Wet-folding is used to shape curves on the birds. This work has some similarities with the Escher artwork used as Bridges Leeuwarden logo, but wasn't intended to be a copy of.
“ Migration fractale ”
2007, One triangle of elephant hide paper, 28 x 28 cm
Origami tessellation : a triangular grid 1/16 is folded all over the sheet, then splitted towards the bottom into 32, 64 and 128, then sets of pleats representing birds are folded. Wet-folding is used to shape curves on the birds.
“ L'art de la fugue ”
2008, One rectangle of elephant hide paper, 40 x 60 cm
Origami tessellation : a grid of triangles is folded all over the sheet, then hexagonal twists are built on one side of the sheet and triangular ones on the other side. This pattern was described by Shuzo Fujimoto in Japan in the 1980's. My idea was to design a sequence of various pursing patterns on the hexagonal twists and arrange it on five rows, like writing music.
“ Stars, flowers and octagons ”
2007, One square of baking paper ,30 x 30 cm
Origami tessellation. The tiling is based on an irregular octagonal star made by folding creases between a corner of the square and the middle of opposite edge. This star has geometrical features that are useful in origami, for dividing the square in 3,5 or 7 equal parts. The most ancient occurence I found for this star is on a mosque in Toledo, Spain, built in the year 999.
“ Dancing twists ”
2007, One square of elephant hide paper, 18 x 28 cm
Origami tessellation. A grid of squares and their diagonals are folded on the sheet, then a repeated arrangement of pleats and twists is built. The same pattern appears on both sides of the paper : this is an iso-area design, means that the set of valley folds is the same as the set of mountain folds, they are transformed one into another by translation and/or rotation. Created while folding a piece of paper, by trial and error, no preliminary drawing or calculations were made.