These Stunning Paper Sculptures Ain't Your Average Origami

When most people look at a piece of paper, they see an unremarkable sheet of flat white material. When Polly Verity looks at piece of paper, she sees potential. Verity specializes in transforming single sheets of paper into surprising three-dimensional tessellations, a tradition of paper-folding called curved-crease origami sculpture with origins in Germany's seminal Bauhaus school of art and design. It was at the Bauhaus in the 1920s that famed artist and designer Josef Albers taught a preliminary course in "paper study." The course was designed to help students approach the humble material with its inherent limitations--its stiffness, its thinness--in mind, and to allow these limitations to inform their creativity.