Paper birds

Lockdown has done strange things to people. I like to think I have carried on pretty much as normal, and certainly as far as work is concerned not a lot has changed other than meetings taking place over zoom.

But I do have one slightly guilty, geeky secret. Sitting in front of a camera that cannot see my hands has had me doodling or spinning a pen, or fiddling and folding bits of foil or paper. Having caught myself doing this during zoom meetings, I decided to take it to the next level and resurrect something I used to do with my dad in the 1970s — origami. Robert Harbin had a TV program that always aired late Sunday afternoon and we would watch together and try to fold the model he was demonstrating. For my 7th birthday my parents gave me a beautiful book by Harbin of various designs by historical and contemporary artists, including Harbin himself.

I know I still have the book somewhere, but haven’t been able to find it. But what I have discovered, is that nowadays there are a lot of plans and even video tutorials available on the web. Very quickly I used the only 3 bits of coloured paper I had following relatively simple designs on YouTube. So that left me with only printer paper that I need crop to a square. The thickness, texture and colour of this are not ideal. It tears fairly easily when folded, doesn’t look nice when photographed, and doesn’t hold its shape very well, necessary for a more modern sculpted look. But I’ve been making do.

The other thing I have discovered returning to a hobby after nearly 50 years is that it has moved on. Modern mathematical approaches and even computing techniques invented and championed by people like Robert Lang have led to entirely new creations and realism. In his excellent TED talk Lang links origami to space telescopes and heart surgery as well as artwork (even Nikki and Erica were interested). Imagine my surprise when at 13.25 he starts talking about medical applications and introduces the work of my old colleague in Engineering Scinece at Oxford, Prof Zhong You, who invented a heart stent that folds down to a tiny capsule using origami folds, and is then unfolded once in place to prop open an artery.

Although these modern methods have led to greater realism, they are often also super difficult to fold, even with the right paper, so most of the designs I’ve made are old or traditional. But I have tried a couple of harder ones, not with complete success but recognisable at least — the toughest I’ve tried so far, in increasing order of difficulty, are the Swallow, Kingfisher, Secretarybird and Crane.