Coming to Light

Some time ago I read an online article about the origami exhibition Yotze la-Or (“yotze la-or” means both “coming to light” and “published” in Hebrew). The paper lanterns shown looked amazing and so I was excited to take a morning away from my own paper crafting to view the exhibition at a small gallery in nearby Holon.

I discovered that the artist whose creations I found so inspiring was Ilan Garibi, a retired Israeli Defence Forces officer. The articIe I read about the exhibition stated that whilst in the IDF Ilan would motivate his soldiers to get up early with the promise of origami lessons. He now makes a living from origami, sometimes collaborating with well known origami artists Miri Golan and Paul Jackson. After 30 years of following patterns, he has been creating his own elaborate patterns since 1998, all within the restrictions of the pure origami rules - no glue, no cuts, just folds and creases.

This exhibition focuses on Ilan's lighting fixtures made of Japanese paper. The artist uses a unique origami technique known as tessellation. A tessellation - also called tiling - is when shapes are arranged side by side to produce a pattern with no gaps in between. Tessellations have existed since ancient Egyptian times and are still common today in floor and wall tilings. In origami tessellations are used to connect elements together in a repeating fashion. Origami tessellations can be regular (triangles, hexagons) or irregular (parallelograms, trapezoids). They are all periodic (repeating pattern).
Ilan Garibi's designs - mostly complex geometric patterns - produce some stunning pieces. A friend and I went to the exhibition together. She is a talented papercut artist herself and we both spent quite some time marvelling at his work, simply trying to figure out just how each piece had been created from just one sheet of paper, folded over and over again to create some truly breathtaking art.

The artist has, in his own words, "a sense of precision I inherited from my (his) father". All the folds in his pieces are made by hand, without the help of a ruler or any mechanical aid.
To see more pictures of Ilan Garibi's remarkable work, take a look at his website.