Uyen Nguyen

Designer
New York, New York, USA

Origami is my greatest passion. I created my first designs by experimenting with freehand folds on paper and seeing if I liked the results. My current work now involves precise calculations, and I generate the crease patterns for my designs on a computer. Mathematics, science, nature, and color theory serve as inspiration for all my works. I love all things bright and colorful, and paper is a great medium to express that love.

Wiggle
Wiggle
22 x 45 x 4 cm
stardream paper
2018

Wiggle is the first design in my Linear Wave series, a collection of flat-foldable origami corrugations that model a raised, nonlinear curve when expanded, and appear linear when in the flat configuration. Other designs in this series include a sine wave, square wave, and Hilbert curve. I am currently developing the method to model any continuous function. Wiggle is based on tangent semicircles. The upper portion of the image shows the extended pattern and the lower portion shows the same pattern fully folded. If this design were folded from zero thickness paper, it would be completely planar and the lower portion would show only a vertical line. Instead, the “wiggle” is collapsed down to a central horizontal line.

Pentagonal Honeycomb
Pentagonal Honeycomb
40 x 40 x 3 cm
stardream paper
2018

This origami corrugation was designed using the method presented in the Bridges 2018 paper, “Origami Explorations of Convex Uniform Tilings Through the Lens of Ron Resch’s Linear Flower,” by Uyen Nguyen and Ben Fritzson. It was modeled after a k-uniform tiling and its dual. The complex units form a 3-isogonal tiling [3⁴6; 3³4²; 3²4.3.4] and the simple units form the dual tiling, which is comprised of three different types of pentagons that can tile the plane: Floret (Type 5), Cairo (Type 4), and Prismatic (Type 1). Individually, each of these pentagons form Catalan tilings. Because the arrangement of these pentagons has hexagonal symmetry, the work is titled Pentagonal Honeycomb. It is folded from one sheet of paper.