Polly Verity is a paper artist I have watched since she came on Instagram (@polyscene)
She has a singular style and a seemingly superhuman touch when it comes to teasing character from paper – her paper silhouettes are like nothing else.
Polly is drawn to the geometry of plain paper, expertly capturing the light and shade that corrugated paper naturally causes.
Today she posted a corrugation that LOOKS curved, but as I bathed in it’s posted beauty, I recognized it had to be a much simpler underlying box-pleated crease pattern, and I knew that I HAD to try it.
Peeling off a 2:1 rectangle from my 90cm Kraft roll (90x45cm resultant sheet), I lay in a longitudinal axis gutter (valley), then added a deeeeep zigzag. This afforded the laying in of standard box-pleat fill-in creases that I then alternated mountain/valley to make the sheet one giant accordion pleat that folds up and on itself (resulting is a stored size that is tiny – 23x2cm).
The joy of this corrugation is that when it opens up, curves emerge from the straight lines – like by magic.
The corrugation looks really interesting hanging and backlit. For long-term display it would need some form of armature to stop it sagging and eventually returning to the flat plane it started as, but wor. There is paper tension, the pleats support each other and, I imagine, with thicker paper, would self-support even more.
Sometimes all it takes to tickle my creative itch is a corrugation – the shadowplay is so beautiful.