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It’s wartime here, like it or not; has been war in Ukraine & Russia almost two years now, will be in the China theater soon enough, and is coming soon
maybe to a theater near you. I’ve decided to revive my Origami Blog.
Here’s a Horse I made on Saturday. My best yet. From a model
first designed in 1993: so thirty years ago (have probably made a hundred), a design that’s since undergone three
permutations, including the one this week.
Origami for me is: well there’s too much to say, but it’s
carried me through some hard times, went with me into the hospital in 2022 for
treatments to stage 2/3 cancer —mantle cell lymphoma — and out of that, for now.
In this war it’s acquiring a strange intensity. I’m dusting off old models and
designs: these ones are for soldiers, whiling away hours on the front; those ones are for me, to shed my emotions into as sculptures & go into museums later,
maybe, if this house-and-studio doesn’t turn into rubble.
It gives a calm; isn’t a screen to watch, or the scream of a
jet, wail of a siren, boom of a missile hitting concrete; is something to
return to after these & figure out: a puzzle with lots of solutions, but
few good ones. It teaches efficiency, economy, humility really, since it is
just a piece of paper for just this moment, no one is going to value it if you
don’t. Like your life.
I had this idea decades ago, when starting this Blog, that
people can no longer hear each other, that words have stopped being effective,
and images, videos, chattering heads, we already have too much of; our plastic
arts in the galleries aren’t cutting it anymore for communication, unification,
or for sparking us into action.
But origami — face it, doesn’t it electrify, when it’s good?
Doesn’t it get the pulse of my blood into the paper, and from there into
yours? Follow it along with your eye’s own fingers, and the heart that’s in
them, and the mind too of course. The geometry and the passion. Take them in, just
from the sight of a model, or if you’ve learned some paperfolding, make one of these for yourself.
Let’s see if we can’t thrill you.
Saadya Sternberg
Beersheva, Israel
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Origami Horse, by Saadya, 2023. 30 cm tall; stained & wetfolded from an uncut 91 cm square of Arches cotton-rag watercolor paper. |