Between the Folds

Constraints are absolutely critical to my own creative process, and I’m more accepting than I used to be of process being part of (or maybe all of) what a creative work is about, as opposed to merely being a means to an end. So I can appreciate the bargain at the heart of origami: A sculptural form is created entirely from folding a single square of paper, with no other materials involved.

I do, however, have a breaking point at which I find a constraint to be rote, pedantic nonsense, and it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of “It took 600 folds for me to make this figure of Mickey Mouse holding a scale model of a 1996 Honda Civic.” Unlike the breathless producer/director/narrator of Between the Folds, I don’t find engineering grandstanding as creative impulse to be very interesting, and early in the documentary, it looked like that would be an impasse. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, and a healthy debate ensued over technique, beauty, the relationship between science and art, and more, with a variety of perspectives, formal approaches, and even functional applications represented.

At 55 minutes, it’s a fairly cursory examination, which made me wish it could have been longer and/or more focused, but it was more eye-opening and enjoyable than I expected.