Life’s Labyrinth Paper Manipulation Videos

Music: The Maze from Sally Potter’s Orlando, by Sally Potter and David Motion

This is absolutely still a draft, but I’m incredibly proud of having been able to accomplish the complicated printing and folding involved in making this booklet! Feel free to pause the video to spend more time reading the text or absorbing the details— the timing is meant to match the music rather than giving time to read each page. This booklet is meant to be an in-person experience, and this video is meant to serve as documentation of this version of the project.

I wanted to find a creative way to present my work, and realized that making an object would be more exciting. To go along with the concept of my thesis being about labyrinths, self determination, and the choices we make corresponding to the paths we follow, I was inspired by choose-your-own-adventure stories so that each of my five looks were their own path and it was up to the viewer which path to follow. I remembered those folding paper games you’d play as a kid that reveal a fortune after choosing a series of numbers, and realized how perfect it was for the choose your own adventure idea.

I made a small scale version of the folding booklet to help me keep page, overall shape, and folding order clear for during the construction of the final booklet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to best present my work in following a non-traditional fashion career, and I wanted to use my technical flats to instead be pictographs explaining the paper manipulations of each look. I then had the idea to make these pictographs interactive by including cut out strips so viewers could follow along, and continued that thread by thinking about how else I could incorporate folding paper into this presentation.

I made this video to demonstrate how to follow the pictographs in manipulating a strip of paper into a mobius— the shape of each garment corresponds to the shape of these manipulated mobius strips, and I wanted participants to be able to understand that shape with their own hands.

The pictographs shown in the video above, enlarged

The first step of my process for each look in my thesis collection was to sculpt mobius strips around the body using paper; the video above show the paper drafts of my original five looks. I eventually decided to simplify the collection by reducing the number of the more complicated looks down to three, so some of these shapes and drafts have since been abandoned and some have been edited and updated.