♪♪
-I just love paper --
the way it folds, the way it feels,
the way it sounds.
I get completely absorbed in the process.
The actual act of putting a crease into a piece of paper,
committing to that crease, and just running along that line --
it's something that I'll never get bored of.
♪♪
I live in a beautiful valley in Wales.
So here's the room where I work, with high ceilings.
It used to be a school, and I'm very lucky.
It has beautiful light.
[ Paper rustling ]
Hello. I'm Polly Verity,
and I fold paper in all sorts of different ways,
and I have done for quite a number of years now.
Sometimes I work with straight lines,
sometimes curves.
I just like to experiment, play,
and see what happens.
I've always been interested in mathematics
and the abstract nature of mathematics,
but I suppose the way that I come at the folding
is not really mathematical in a conventional sense,
but more I'm working up from the empirical,
so I'm having a go.
I'm playing with it. I'm seeing what happens.
I'm beginning to recognize packed patterns,
and if I've been folding intensely for long enough,
I begin to be able to look at
a two-dimensional crease pattern
and get a sense of whether it will fold
or how it might begin to look.
So, for years I've folded
geometric repeat patterns in paper,
constructing the repeat pattern in some straight lines,
often being inspired by
two-dimensional geometric patterns
and wondering whether I could fold them
in low-relief 3-D.
And eventually, I'd frame these up
'cause if I frame them, I have to sort of
fix where they are in space,
and in a way, they want to be free.
And then I started folding along curves
and what was really exciting.
There's something about curves in a piece of paper
that just do really unexpected things.
I never know.
I draw up the lines on the computer
and send it to my scoring machine,
which is a vinyl cutter, and that cuts
very slightly into the paper,
weakens it just along those lines
so I can then fold along those lines.
I began making paper dresses and paper skirts.
The reason mainly
was so that I could have the pieces at scale.
As the person who was wearing the paper dress
or the paper skirt was moving,
then the piece itself would animate.
What are my influences?
I'm inspired by things that I see in nature --
the unfurling of a fern or a leaf.
All sorts of things -- a bit of architecture
that I happen to see.
I might look at somebody's face and be fascinated
by how they seem to be molded or put together.
I saw that I could fold along the profile
of the face.
Almost instantly, I saw that I could
ease certain parts of the paper out
and make some parts of the paper concave.
I could start to form the face.
So that was really exciting, and then I tried to do that
with dampened watercolor paper.
When it's damp, it folds like leather,
and you can gently ease the form into being.
Then eventually became two faces kissing
because I was able to use the paper on the other side
and tease that side also into being.
I'm constantly experimenting, see what happens next.
I don't really have a direction.
It just comes when it comes or not.
So here's a cigarette,
and then that allowed me to get more depth.
I could really go into the mouth.
Here, in the same way, I've used a straw
to get that feeling of depth into the mouth,
or a tongue.
And it meant then that the lips popped out a bit more.
I'm half working figuratively,
sensing the shape and form of the body, the face,
and I'm half working
with a sense of what these curves might do
and have done in the past.
And so it's sort of retaining that knowledge
in the back of my mind
and can help inform the more figurative works.
Even though I've been working with them
for a long time, I can
be always surprised.
And that's what keeps me going, moving bit.
♪♪
be always surprised.
And that's what keeps me going, moving bit.
♪♪