FURL: THE ORIGAMI ABSTRACTIONS OF SUSAN RAYBOULD
By Peter Frank - Art Critic - Writer
Nowhere on earth are the aesthetics of a civilization more intertwined with its core materials than in Far East Asia. To be sure, the substances from which all cultures fashion their artifacts inarguably and invariably impact the inherent sensibility of those cultures. But one gets a unique sense of, well, sui generation from the presence of paper in the arts (fine, decorative, craft, functional) of China, Korea, and Japan. Paper is the basis for most material invention in these regions, and observers have proposed for centuries that there is a particular “aesthetic of paper” that can be universally applied – well beyond the Gobi Desert and the South China Sea – to the creation of artistic objects.
Such a proposition – generally, but specifically with regard to paper – has since the 19th century become readily available to artists throughout the Western world. We can now think of paper as a sculptural medium and not just as a support for calligraphy and pigmentation. A paper lantern is as reasonable a source of illumination as is a metal lamp. Standing screens that in the west were traditionally fabricated out of wood can now just as well be fashioned out of paper. Why? Because the arts of the far East, which we so admire for their sensuous presence and their taciturn beauty, demonstrate to us the artistic excellence, even primacy, achievable with paper as paper. The artistic masters of the West print their lithographs and paint their watercolors on the finest handmade papers, in great part due to the example set by far Eastern artists and artisans.
Susan Raybould displays a yet deeper commitment to the concept of paper-as-world. Raybould has come to adopt not only Japanese paper but a by-now-traditional art form born of that paper to her artistic vision. The practice of origami [oru = folded, kami = paper] is an ancient art form that was made accessible to all during Japan’s late-19th-century Meiji restoration. This esoteric practice deeply informs Raybould’s current artwork, allowing her compositions a vital flow that her previous bodies of work, successful as they had been, had not fully engaged. Working abstractly with properties and materials associated with origami, Raybould has all but left behind her previous pictorial work, exchanging observation for sensation in the now time-honored evolution provided abstraction in Western art.
Raybould’s adoption of origami as her art form was hardly straightforward. She began her career within an entirely different tradition, that of wildlife art. And she did so a world away from her native England – although her studies in San Francisco in the early 1990s were in the master class of fellow Briton John Seerey-Lester, the so-called “godfather of wildlife art.” She took inspiration as well from other high-profile wildlife painters such as Robert Bateman and Robert Wyland.
Raybould’s first outing as a wildlife painter came in 1992, working in Hawai’i as part of John Wullbrandt’s Lanai Art Program, responsible for murals and individual canvas paintings for the Manele Bay Hotel. She subsequently worked on her own, mostly fulfilling commissions in a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia and South Africa. In 2005, Raybould moved to one more far-flung locale, Benbrook, Texas, outside Fort Worth. There, she realized a series of ceramic sculptures depicting animals native to the lands where she had lived. Adding three dimensions to her repertoire, as she later discovered, made her an inheritor of the animalier tradition practiced by Antoine-Louis Barye and other 19th-century European academic sculptors.
Raybould’s animalier ceramics are notable for their cross-dynamic energy, that is, the force and vibrancy they gain from their two formal sources – the animal itself and its surroundings – in vital interaction. For all their faithfulness to the appearance and behavior of her miniaturized creatures, these works in clay brim with a formal self-possession that borders on the abstract.
A 2015 visit to Japan proved revelatory. Raybould was taken by the country’s varied traditions of paper art, responding in particular to the possibilities of origami sculpture. She immediately began moving away from realism and to experiment with traditional origami forms and techniques in both figurative and, ultimately, non-objective manners. Raybould’s first explorations of the traditional wet-fold origami technique led to experimentation with stop-motion animation when she moved to Los Angeles in 2017. There, influenced in particular by the “claymation” of Aardman Animations (“Wallace & Gromit”), she began designing, producing, and directing origami-based, stop-motion animated music videos for musicians.
The labor-intensive and often tedious nature of stop-motion filmmaking led Raybould to seek more immediate effect with origami paper sculpture, derived from but not bound by the Japanese tradition. She took inspiration from other Western artists’ work with abstract origami – the Dutch artist Peter Gentenaar, for instance, and Englishman Richard Sweeney – realizing that the method was a vehicle not just for the depiction but for the induction of sensation.
In her current work, Raybould experiments with color, composition, and, most particularly, the sensation of motion, all without reference to the observed world. Her sculptural paper objects coil and pleat as if mapping the feral energy of Raybould’s earlier nature imagery. Those animal subjects remain in her art in spirit, powerful as ever, but now subsume into the shape and motion of the paper medium per se. No matter how abstract, an artwork is a representation of sensed phenomena – the shape of clouds, the movement of air, the scent in the drift – and reflects life’s vibrancy, whether as things we recognize or as things we sense.
By going abstract after her adoption of the origami method, Susan Raybould made a broad leap of faith. She had invested her understanding of visual art into a literal rendition of the earth we inhabit and the creatures who inhabit it with us. In Japan, she saw that a celebration of the earth’s creatures need not be a literal one. Energy is energy, and the generation of pure form – enhanced with pure color – does not absent the reality of life but exemplifies and re-performs it, for Raybould life is everywhere, in large mammals and in voluminous waves of formulated paper alike. Raybould’s abstractions in origami are animals in another frame.
Los Angeles September 2024
