Aaron Yu
I first started working with origami as a child, mainly by folding standard pieces like cranes and boxes. I stopped folding as I got older and had a larger workload in school. But I had the fortune of taking a class at my school that allowed students to propose their own projects. I took advantage of it and reignited my passion for origami. I started reading Eric Gjerde’s Origami Tessellations, which made me more interested in the mathematical aspects of origami, particularly exploring tessellations. This process of folding the tessellations in the book helped me come to understand far more than I would have otherwise. Going through the book was akin to an apprenticeship, and helped me understand the basics of folding origami tessellations.
I was inspired to create a tessellation of my own, working off the basic square weave. This piece complicates a basic square weave by adding many more interwoven patterns and blowing up each vertex into a cycle of interwoven squares. This tessellation is different from some other origami tessellations in that it has an extremely nice back as well as front, containing cyclically overlapping squares at each corresponding intersection of weaves on the front. I thought it was amazing how a piece of folded flat paper was able to so aptly imitate a woven pattern. Although I went through many failures, the result was well worth the effort.