Creative Folding

We started through a Spanish story that was of easy comprehension. The story had many illustrations and repetitive sequences, as a never ending story type. Although the story didn’t have a direct relation with the activity that was proposed later, it helped to create a captivating environment and stimulate the children’s imagination. However, if I had a nice story related with the activity theme I would have used it, too. After the class, Ms. Calihan recommended a nice book, called: Fold me a poem.

After the story, Ms. Calihan perceived that the kids took a little while trying to create the relation with the story and the creative folding proposed. This happened because they are used to a different methodology that directly connects all the activities and makes the propositions more objective and consequently automatic. The intentional disconnection however, gave them time to think about the activity I was proposing, what explains the time they took to process it.
The objective was to propose them to find out their own starting point. This process is not easy, though. If I had given them a link with the story, they would limit their production to figurative shapes of the animals (characters) of the given story. Letting them choose their own shapes was more challenging and opened to unexpected results of original and/or abstract shapes. Knowing that, on previous classes, they had learnt some origamis, I told them that they would use the thinks they learned but also they should create their own foldings and techniques.
In fact it happened and we had different results. They reproduced some bats and puppies and created compositions with them. Others didn’t remember how to make the origamis then, they transformed the shapes, using things they remembered with inventiveness. I though it might create some conflicts but almost all of them dealt very well and enjoyed the fact that, they could do anything they want to.

Creative process involves the solution of problems. The problems vary from these kind of “creative crises”, to the solution of technical problems. These problems occur very often and they are healthy when worked to be surpassed, as many artists do when working. In this class, the recurrent problem was, how to set the shapes on a way they would be stand still, as the kids intended to do. As shown in the picture, some shapes didn’t have a base to put the glue. So, we oriented the children to make these bases and they did it with care and patience.

As a matter of themes and compositions, many of them, connected with previous works or with the project developed on their classes. They did airplanes taking off or flying, because they’re studying airplanes with Ms. Calihan. They did bats, frogs and puppies and combined them in one composition, because they learned with Ms. Yukiko on previous classes. They invented abstract and figurative forms, putting them together and even creating a story for their 3-D compositions. I couldn’t listen all of the stories but I had time to follow one by one during the process.
As a reference work to this activity, I recommend the works of Richard Serra and Amilcar de Castro.