Éric Joisel

Éric Joisel (15 November 1956 – 10 October 2010) was a French origami artist who specialized in the wet-folding method, creating figurative art sculptures using sheets of paper and water, without the use of any adhesive or scissors.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Early life

Joisel was born on 15 November 1956, in Montmorency, Val-d'Oise, a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, and focused his education on history and law before turning to art. His initial experiences in the art world were in sculpting, using the traditional forms of clay and stone.

Career

He first discovered in the 1980s the unique forms created with paper by Akira Yoshizawa, the Japanese grandmaster of origami who had created more than 50,000 models, developing the wet-folding method that allowed for the creation of three-dimensional rounded sculptures. Joisel was taken by the way the Yoshizawa's works blended classical origami methods and standard forms of sculpture in order to make expressive figures out of wet paper, without making any cuts or using any glue.^[6]

Joisel shifted to working with paper in the 1990s, devoting the remainder of his career to creating origami art using his own self-taught variation of the wet-folding techniques that Yoshizawa had developed and refined.

Joisel published many of the design plans for his figures, providing a look into the extraordinary level of detail and precision that "renders his art simultaneously approachable and unattainable". In his obituary, The New York Times included instructions on how to duplicate one of Joisel's figures of a rat, though it noted that "no lay person should even contemplate the hedgehog".^[6]

Joisel was featured in the documentary Between the Folds, a 2009 film by Vanessa Gould about the modern world of origami artists.

Gallery

• 
  Joisel's First Dwarf
• 
  Three Kings - from Lord of the Ring
• 
  Gandalf
• 
  The Origami Rat

Death

A resident of Sannois, Joisel died at the age of 53 on 10 October 2010, in Argenteuil, of lung cancer. He had never married and had no children, and was survived by four siblings.^[6]

References

External links

• Hommage à Éric Joisel
• Forever - Eric Joisel (15/11/1956 - 10/10/2010)
• Eric Joisel Award 2012 : Kade Chan
• Instructions to create a sculpture of a rat
• http://www.ericjoisel.com/
• Éric Joisel at Find a Grave
• Interview in the British Origami Society magazine