“Aeroplane, boat, fan... People think that is what origami is all about,” laughs Roopika Sood, an educator and origami artist. There’s of course much more to that, as I discover in her snug home at Harrington Road, which doubles up as her working area. The space is alive with her art — a pleated lamp, green and red Christmas trees, festive décor, vibrant utility boxes, a moving flexagon (an example of kinetic origami).
Holding up a yellow sheet with an intricate pattern in the middle she says, “This is called tessellation. It is one sheet of paper with repetitive tiling patterns. You can’t afford to go wrong with the creases. It’s a gruelling process and took me six hours.” Roopika stumbled across origami seven years ago. The introductory session was supposed to be for an hour. “But I did it at a stretch for six hours. When I got back I wasn’t tired,” she says.
A Sonobe Cube is the first thing that Roopika learnt to make. And that’s the first thing she teaches beginners in her class. Sometimes people who attend her classes say they know how this art form works and create a fan (the ones we made back in school) as a quick demo. That’s when she fascinates them by adding a little fold and twist to the fan and turning it into a lantern or another charming piece of décor.
The artist has been teaching for the last seven years. “I was a teacher in Rishi Valley School (Chittoor district). Origami started as a weekend club there. But after the class was oversubscribed, it eventually became part of art and craft activity,” says Roopika, who started out as an English teacher but after a point, realised she was overlooking English corrections and all her focus was on this craft.
“So I started doing this full time,” she laughs. She also taught at Sahyadri School in Pune. “They were starting a maker space. It’s a buzzword across schools. It’s where they give kids the impetus to experiment with their own ideas. They were looking to start origami design and paper craft. The principal also wanted to experiment with origami and math, to make it more accessible across all age groups. I became a full time origami teacher there.”
A resident of Chennai for the last two years, Roopika teaches this craft to children and adults at her home and at the Temple Tree school campus in Besant Nagar. On other days she travels to different cities to conduct workshops in design and engineering colleges.
“Chennai is very experimental. Parents are looking for avenues other than just intellectual pursuits,” adds Roopika. She has also discovered that Parrys is the real hub for paper. At any given point of time, she has at least 24 different colour papers at home and the types vary from metal-sheeted and translucent to double-sheeted origami paper.
“Christmas has completely taken over everything we are doing,” she says pointing to a table filled with 2D and 3D wreaths, Christmas trees, ornaments, 12 point stars, and gift boxes. There are apparently 67 different kinds of methods to make these trees, she says. The gift boxes are a hit this time of the year with people wrapping their gifts in them. “In traditional Japanese culture, you need to make the gift so appealing that the receiver should not want to open it,” laughs Roopika and adds, “They work with a lot of pleatings and embellishments. You can even wrap the present in regular paper and jazz it up by curling, coiling or weaving paper.
