Folded Poetry brings beauty and functionality to our everyday spaces.
Using form and shadow, this work pushes the boundaries of visual experience.
Simple yet perplexing, the viewer is challenged to reflect on the way they encounter the world.
Folded Poetry seeks unique design problems which present opportunity to broaden the horizon where functionality and art meet.
About The Artist
Eliza Redmann
When a car accident upended my health, personal life, and career as an architect, I was forced to reinvent myself. I found a way to utilize my creative potential for healing by creating functional art. My passion to create is driven by my changed experience of life after my traumatic brain injury. Both the function and aesthetic of my work are born out of experiencing disability.
Aesthetically, the work is inspired by the persistent visual disturbances I manage on a daily basis. Often when I look at patterns, they appear to swim or move on their own accord, much like an optical illusion. I seek to capture the structure of regular patterns and shapes, while adding a layer of geometric information which the eyes and brain can't quite make sense of. This visual disorientation is designed to challenge viewers to perceive outside of what is normal or traditional, just as I must now live, adapt, and navigate the world in new ways
Functionally, this work is driven by my experience of auditory overwhelm. After my brain injury I found myself unable to function in loud spaces. Suddenly having an accessibility barrier to most of the places where I had once enjoyed spending time motivated me to explore producing acoustical art. I have since found that controlling sound in a visually appealing manner can provide widespread benefits for various users and applications.
I draw upon my architecture background and education of the design process to explore this combination of aesthetic and function. While my work is indeed impactful as functional art, more importantly it has been the primary driver behind the re-establishment of my health and the reimagining of my life’s purpose.
Constraint breeds creativity
Operating with a visual disability constrains my ability to spend prolonged time on a computer generating designs. The bedrock of Folded Poetry is the use of a small number of simple forms which, when created and compiled physically, can be arranged to create complex geometries.
Simplicity is both the constraint and the strength of Folded Poetry.
About The Studio
Folded Poetry
The Folded Poetry studio is dedicated to design exploration. The studio uses design thinking to find innovative and elegant solutions for a variety of visual and spatial applications.
Based in Durham, North Carolina, Folded Poetry is a child of the pandemic, born by simple paper form studies made in the basement of my home during April of 2020.
Loyal to it's origin, Folded Poetry still operates in the same basement space, though renovated and updated to accommodate the rapidly expanding demand for work.
Following the intuition to "just begin" has led to an explosion of commissions and collaborations. While folded paper sculptural framed pieces are still the bread and butter of Folded Poetry, the scope of application for the designs is constantly expanding.
From licensed prints to large free-mounted art installations, beauty of the designs lies in their scalability both up and down.
Committed to exploration, the work of Folded Poetry navigates where aesthetics meet functionality. The possibilities of what can be created using the design principles of Folded Poetry are truly endless.
