Advent of Tess: Monroeville resident offers origami challenge

Perhaps you’ve marveled at someone taking a piece of paper and folding it to produce the shape of a bird or flower.

That general practice served as Madonna Yoder’s introduction to origami.

“It started with making my own toys during church services,” the Monroeville resident said. “I would sit there and take the church bulletin and break it down into squares, and fold like a dozen little animals, and give them away to guests at the end of the service.”

Fast-forward about a decade, to when she was a geology major at the highly esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taking a course called Geometric Folding Algorithms.

“I started folding a lot of triangle grids because my final project for that class was on triangular grid mazes: folding an entire maze with vertical walls and floors out of a single sheet of paper,” she said. “That kind of sent me in the direction of tessellations.”

The etymology of origami has it deriving from two Japanese words: ori, “fold,” and kami, “paper.” In perhaps its simplest form, picture making a paper airplane.

Now picture taking that same sheet and folding and folding and folding, as you develop a series of intricate geometrically based patterns that produce a veritable work of art.

Welcome to the world of origami tessellations. And welcome to Yoder’s mini-tessellation folding challenge, Advent of Tess.

Through Gathering Folds, her business that teaches the craft, she will post tutorial videos each day from Dec. 1 through Christmas, guiding participants through projects that become progressively difficult. The challenge is free to join, and packs of paper are available for sale through her website.

For Advent of Tess, she is using six-sided paper as opposed to the standard four.

“You get more variety on hexagons than on squares, because there are just more shapes,” she said, explaining that folding from the vantage point of half a dozen sides can result in geometric configurations like triangles, trapezoids and rhombuses. “Really, with the square grid, you’re looking at squares and right triangles.

“Plus it fits with the advent theme of snowflakes.”

Daily tutorials run 10 to 20 minutes, and Yoder’s video setup is equipped with an overhead camera to provide close-up views of her in action, folding as she explains what she’s doing.

Her method actually starts with pre-folding, if you will: making creases to produce a grid, as a way to ease the main folding process.

“From there, I can start adding shapes to the paper,” she said.

Then comes a key aspect of constructing tessellations:

“If I want the pattern to repeat, it has to follow certain rules. And I like these patterns enough that I actually tattooed one of those rules onto my finger. It doubles as a wedding ring.”

After Yoder graduated from MIT, she took a job writing computer code at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where she met fellow coder and future husband Manuel Meraz Rodriguez. Because of his interest in robotics, they relocated to the Pittsburgh area, arriving in January 2020.

“We had decided before we moved that, since we were coming to a lower-cost-of-living area, it would be a good chance for me to try to start an art business and make a go of it as an artist,” Yoder said. “And that’s how Gathering Folds was born.”

“Constellations,” an exhibition of her tessellations, runs through Dec. 30 in the Unblurred Gallery at Los Sabrosos Dance Company, 4909 Penn Ave., Garfield. The work can be viewed by appointment or at the next First Friday event, Dec. 1, during which she will be present for demonstrations.

Beyond art, the science behind tessellations has other applications.

For example, Yoder’s Geometric Folding Algorithms professor at MIT, Erik Demaine, conducts research on topics such as the geometry of understanding how proteins fold. And engineers at Brigham Young University “are applying origami to everything from diapers to police shelters to pop-up tents for emergency situations,” according to Yoder.

“There are a lot of applications of origami in space, as well,” she said. “You have something big, and you want it to be small. Or you want something to be small temporarily, so that it can expand out and be big again.”

And more down to earth:

“How do you effectively package an air bag into a car, so it doesn’t kind of lock in certain parts when it’s trying to pop open?”

The Virginia native’s own field of study is relevant, too.

“Everything about geology, from a mapping standpoint, is trying to understand what things are doing where you can’t see them. And so you have to develop this 3D visualization of how do all these things come together, and what processes had to form them from a flat sheet of rock,” she said. “So there’s a surprising amount of connectivity between geology and origami.”

And it all connects back to that marvelous bird or flower.

For more information, visit gatheringfolds.com and Los Sabrosos Dance Company at lspgh.com/art.