Here are a few of my Kirigami sculptures, art projects, sketches, and drawings.
Kirigami Sculptures
Kirigami is a beautiful art form defined by the folding and cutting of paper. Although Kirigami can take a wide variety of forms, I like to focus on building 3D structures that can fold out of a single sheet of paper.
I design all of my own patterns, starting in my notebook, then drawing the schematic in Oreidita, and eventually cutting and folding them out with a ruler, knife, and a piece of cardstock.
What you end up with is a flat sheet that billows out into a fantastical geometric construction when unfolded.
Diagonal Meander - paper, 10.5” x 5.5”
One of the most intriguing things about this kind of Kirigami is the mathematical aspect of it. Every cut and fold has to be meticulously planned beforehand otherwise sections might not link together or collapse properly.
In this project, the central meandering river is held in the center by a set of angled diamonds. Any time you make a cut at a 45 degree angle, it needs to be followed by another one, in the opposite direction, in just the right location, to reconnect it to the rest of the piece.
In spite of the paper flaring out in every direction at once, it seamlessly folds flat when pressed down to the table.
Stepped Honeycomb Prototype - paper
Due to the technical intricacy of these sculptures, I often have to prototype, and trial-and-error things a lot before I can make a final project. This smaller version of the below sculpture looks almost completely perfect, but contorts into a small spiral when folded in half, as the two pieces fold past each other instead of collapsing into a single stack.
This failed prototype highlights the almost invisible intricacy to getting the folds to properly resolve themselves to create a beautiful but also functional sculpture.
Large Stepped Honeycomb - paper
I designed this futuristic hexa-comb structure to make use of every single piece of the original paper, whether it recedes into the hexagons’ centers, or joins the top to the bottom through the wavy bridges on the sides.
Light Hopper - paper
The most fascinating part about Kirigami sculptures is the way they interact with light, creating an inversion of positive and negative spaces.
I designed this project to be lit from behind, almost like a double sided lampshade, with the top and bottom open to let light spill and filter throughout its many steps. The resulting patterns are beautiful mosaic patterns of light on the ceiling and a little bit of the table, in the image.
The paper’s translucence offers a lot too, with especially bright streaks lining every mountain-fold, where the paper is slightly thinner from me having carefully cut through its outer layer.
Chained Together - paper
This sculpture is actually two completely different sculptures, cut from different patterns, woven into each other to create an inseparable chain. This project was one of my favorite experiments trying to work with the limitations of Kirigami, expanding past the rules of using a single sheet of paper. The effect of one sculpture weaving through the chain-like gaps of another required a lot more careful consideration of where each component of two separate schematics were in space, and how they’d interact with the parts and gaps of their counterparts.
Assorted Media
Study of Manifold Garden - Adobe Photoshop
This illustration is inspired by the themes of a game I love, Manifold Garden, a game where there is no right-side-up nor upside down.
My favorite aspects of Manifold Garden are the way it subverts the idea of monumental structures, creating massive landscapes of buildings only ever designed for a single person. I wanted to capture the endless feeling of its world by stretching out it’s structures out into the distance, using a carefully selected scheme of colors to create a sense of aerial perspective.
I decided to leave the bottom of the piece empty and open, to further add to the feeling of monumentality in Manifold Garden’s world.
The Amethyst Perimeter- Adobe Photoshop
This project is a graphic I designed for WaveTech, an online Minecraft engineering community I’m a member of. It’s used to showcase one of their most impressive engineering projects and is used extensively on their merch store.
I focused on the natural tendency for impure amethyst crystals to develop darker edges and points, in order to outline the forms of the crystals in the design.
Stone Arch
This summer, I worked on a a 12-foot-tall stone archway sculpture overlooking the valley on our farm. I contributed to designing the scaffolding used to support the heavy stone arch, working out the complex curvature and taper of the arch as it approaches the center. I did not lay any of the stones directly though, as I was at Carnegie Mellon University’s summer program at the time, studying architecture.
The monument highlights the circularity of our family’s relationship with the farm and its resources.
Solitary Lamppost
I really love lampposts as subjects because they often symbolize a waypoint, a beacon, or destination in space, gradually highlighting its surroundings.
Here, I’ve placed the lamppost in a place with no direction or purpose. Its limited light offers little in the sea of fog and nothingness.
unititled
This is a study of the relationship between humanity and nature. The blending of the human elements of eyes with the petals of a flower, combined with the unnatural symmetry represented in their shapes contributes to an unnerving feeling.
I also used dithering in this piece to contribute to a sense of decay, while simultaneously bringing the work to life, as the pixels dance when viewed through different resolutions.
The Sewer
This piece, depicting a person peering into a sewer on the streets of a city, is inspired by the visual novel Corru.Observer.
I used dithering to paint the scene with black and white, distorting and shifting the layers of shades to create the sense of surreality of Corru’s visual style. The faceless person still expresses some disinterest through the focus of their eyes.
Sketching and Drawing
Dominican Palm - ink, 5” x 7”
I almost always bring a sketchbook with me, because sketching and drawing is like taking a photo, only I get to be very specific about the parts I care about and want to include.
This is a young Dominican palm tree, drawn with a rollerball pen that really isn’t for drawing, but was the only thing I had on hand. I did this sketch to capture that special way the fronds naturally flare out, and fall over each other when they begin to decay.
Pierson Library’s Chandelier - ink, 5” x 7”
When I sketch with pencil, it’s often because I’m drawing something complicated that I know that I won’t get right on the first try.
In the Pierson Library at Yale University, I wanted to capture the intricate geometric arrangement of this chandelier’s candles as they spill out from the center, focusing on the way it appeared to me, sitting at the end of a table below.
Falling Water - ink, 5” x 7”
This is a sketch of one of my favorite buildings, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, in Pittsburgh. In the summer of 2024, I had the wonderful opportunity to visit.
One of the most characteristic ideas represented by the building is it’s natural integration with the landscape, and the waterfall it sits upon. I wanted to represent that by emphasizing the shape of the house above all, and its various layers as they spill over the hill, down into the waterfall creek below me.
Brushwork Still Lifes - ink, 5” x 7”
Though I draw in mostly ink, I do like to play around with a variety of different methods of putting it onto the paper.
These two drawings, one day after another, onto the same spread of my notebook, are both done with a very large brush pen, giving me the opportunity to make some lines much heavier.
I used that extra control to give these two a more cartoonish finish, doing the details I wanted you to see in lines you certainly can’t miss.
Aside from their practical uses, brush pens are just my favorite way of sketching because I get the haste of a quick ink sketch with the feeling of being a painter.
Various Studies of Flowers, Leaves, Petals, and Plants.
Of all the subjects I draw, I draw flowers the most (with some trees and other kinds of plants scattered in there).
Flowers are incredibly organic, and come in every shape, size and orientation, making them incredibly fun to draw from both imagination as well as an actual vase of flowers (something I see very often in my day to day life).
They’re also quite challenging to draw, especially if it’s a large batch, because you need to be able to capture the illusion of multitudes without actually drawing every single petal.
The same goes for trees — like the bottom right — where drawing every leaf is impossible, but you still need to convey the idea of ‘many’.
Imaginary Bridge - ink, 5” x 7”
When I’m moving around, I don’t only sketch the things around me. I also spend a lot of time drawing things from my imagination.
This is a stone arch bridge, done in ink and a little bit of marker. I do all of my perspective freehand, because I try to spend as little time as possible on any sketch, focusing on getting the idea down rather than exactly perfect parallel perspective lines.
Nautilus - Adobe Photoshop
While most of my digital work is more abstract, I do still enjoy trying to create an ‘inkier’ paper like feel.
This was done in Adobe Photoshop, where I’m used to making more angular, geometric forms.
There’s a single straight line in this entire piece, because I wanted to combine two incredibly natural and flowing things: Nautuli, and plants.