Featured artwork: Phoenix by Yulia Brodskaya. Artwork and images courtesy of Yulia Brodskaya, used with permission.
Folding another strip of paper might look like repeating the same small job. For Yulia Brodskaya, the repetition keeps arriving with decisions about color, length and the shape of the folded piece.
“I’m constantly making small decisions about the colours of the strips I fold together, the length and overall shape of each folded piece,” Brodskaya wrote in a written interview with Tingles. “I often pause to check it in position to make sure it fits the space I’m filling.”
“So although the movements are repetitive, my mind and intuition are always engaged, and I’m watching the image gradually emerge,” she writes. The rhythm comes with attention to the material rather than a break from it.
“I choose colours intuitively, but this intuition is informed by many years of experience — first, mixing colours on a palette as in traditional painting, and later observing how the same principles apply when mixing two or more strips of colour, which is an optical illusion rather than a real mix, of course,” Brodskaya wrote.
The strips remain separate pieces of colored paper; their arrangement changes how the colors read together.
“The same principles apply: for example, if you fold a red and a yellow strip of paper together, the overall colour will be perceived as a shade of orange,” she wrote.
“In most cases, I try to fold as densely as possible, which helps create a more unified look for the 3D brushstroke,” Brodskaya wrote.
“But this isn't always possible, so naturally, some areas become less dense, with the separate folded segments visible, adding more texture,” she wrote.
“I don't try to control this process too much,” Brodskaya wrote. “Instead, I try to balance what I'm planning to do with what the paper naturally wants to do — to work and flow with it rather than fight the process.”
Her account gives the material a practical say in the image. A planned color or shape still has to fit the space, and the folding can leave a surface different from the one she first imagined.
The viewer can move between those scales of attention. In her FAQ, Brodskaya describes colors blending when seen from a distance; in the interview, she connects the closer view to seeing the individual elements that make the whole.
“For me, this is about unity and complexity — how an artwork can be perceived as a cohesive whole, but when you come closer and look at the details, you begin to realise how many individual elements have to work together to create the complete story,” Brodskaya wrote.
The repeated fold is one part of that work, and the choice of what to fold next is another. Looking closely at the paper edges makes room to notice both.