Cerrillos artist folds a giant origami garden out of metal
May 10—It may seem impossible to conceive, now that this structure is a 4,000-pound metal horse. But at one point, somebody lovingly folded its design with their bare hands.
You can see the creases and can deduce from the angular nature of the sculpture's limbs that this was a paper horse that probably stood on its own power.
Then, after an ancient technique modified to produce modern results, the work grew to several times its original size and weight.
Visitors can stand beneath the monumental sculptures at Florigami — the traveling exhibit created by Kevin and Jennifer Box that is currently housed in their front yard — and wonder about how they were made. The truth, says Kevin Box, is that each of the pieces can take up to a year to create using a process he's worked on for years.
"I pioneered a technique that employs the ceramic shell, lost-wax casting process to transform the paper into museum-quality metals like bronze, aluminum, and stainless steel," says Box of his pieces, some of which stand 30 feet tall. "Lost-wax casting is a 6,000-year-old, 35-step, 12-week process, if everything goes right. Many of the pieces take a year to create, since every step is done by hand in a foundry. The bonus was recognizing that certain pieces could scale up infinitely using sheet metal fabrication. The simple fact that origami begins as a flat piece lends itself to cutting flat sheets of metal and welding them into the complex forms."
details
Florigami
9 a.m. to 1 p.m. weekdays from Monday, May 13, to November 1
Box Studio & Sculpture Garden
3453 NM 14, Cerrillos
Florigami, as one might be able to tell from the name, is dominated by representations of flowers in origami form. Among the sculptures is a bouquet on site as well as a multicolored rose kusudama (Japanese medicine ball).
Box, born in Oklahoma and now based in Santa Fe, never set out to be an origami artist — much less a creator of giant origami. But in the early days of his practice, he says everybody who saw his work likened it to origami.
So instead of fighting the perception, he leaned into it. He contacted accomplished origami artist Robert Lang and inquired about collaborating. Lang was immediately receptive, and for the last 15 years, they've turned paper art into metal. A number of other artists have also worked with Box to create larger-than-life sculptures.
Box worked for many years at a fine art foundry in Texas and developed a fabrication studio at his home. Several of the pieces in the Florigami exhibit are made out of aluminum on the premises.
The team's lead fabricator, Eben Markowski, says he and Box are among the few artists in the state who are also certified welders.
The giant horse, which was sitting in the driveway during a recent visit by a Pasatiempo reporter, took seven years to design, Markowski says.
Artist Te Jui Fu designed it, and Markowski and Box had to figure out how to blow it up into a metal frame. Each limb was cut with a high-pressure water jet that can reach up to 14,000 pounds per square inch, says Markowski. All of the pieces are numbered and made to size, but Markowski says sometimes they have to shave off an edge to make it work.
No internal armature holds the pieces together, although Markowski says they use internal buttressing in some places and triangulation in others.
Eventually, the pieces are welded together, and in some places bolted to allow for easy disassembling.
"Part of Kevin's aesthetic is a show of the process," Markowski says. "There was a directive not to chase away welds, which is another thing. Many other artists want to make [the seams] invisible. To make that work and not go crazy, getting everything aligned properly was important to me. A lot of it is the feasibility of welding; the more proper things are lined up, the more efficient you can weld it and there's less complications after the fact."
Once everything is designed, the pieces are painted, and given the size of some of the structures, it's a huge effort to make a horse of a different color.
"It's a dusted-on paint that's then baked in an oven," Markowski says. "The biggest oven we work with is 10 feet high, 12 feet wide, and 40 feet long. The head came back to us from the powder-coating. The body was powder-coated in the lower section of the legs and came back to us separately. ... We had to hit these exacting points. We suspended it and then welded the legs on after things had been painted."
Jennifer Box is a former dancer who trained with the Alvin Ailey company; destiny led her to New Mexico. She moved to Santa Fe from Manhattan in 2005 to work for the National Dance Institute; she moved down on a Wednesday and met Kevin, her future husband, that Friday.
Six months later, they got engaged, and six months after that, they married.
They acquired their 35-acre Turquoise Trail property in Cerrillos — dominated by scenic rock outcroppings and jaw-dropping New Mexico vistas — in 2006, and although they wouldn't build their house and move into it for another five years, the artist already had a vision.
"When we first owned this land, Kevin would come out with the Bobcat and drag it around and make trails," says Jennifer Box. "I was like, 'What is he doing?' He said, 'We're going to have a sculpture garden here.' I thought the house would go out there, because it's a big open space. Instead, we gave the great landscape to our community, and we stuck our house in between the rocks. He's got the five-year, the 50-year, and the 5,000-year plan."
Jennifer Box threw herself into her husband's work. Together, they planned how to scale up the work and take it from magnificent individual pieces to themed exhibitions that could be displayed at botanical gardens across the country.
To do that, they had to think beyond the art realm. They needed engineers to examine the sculptures and make sure they'd stand up to Florida hurricanes or California earthquakes, and they had to nail down logistics to move the pieces around the country.
They now have it down to a science. The sculptures are broken down into shipping containers, and a fleet of tractor trailers delivers them to the next location. Each piece is meticulously labeled to ease the process of putting them back together.
Box Studio and Sculpture Garden manager Sarah Hodzic says it can take a team of four people an entire day to disassemble, clean, and pack up just one of the massive sculptures. Florigami includes 70 sculptures arranged into 18 installations, and if you have a lonely yard waiting for some embellishment, Jennifer Box says the sculptures can be made to order.
"As an artist, everything is for sale," she says. "Give me the right budget and timeline, and I can make it happen for you. For these, we've had some interest, but we'd have to make another one. These were specifically created for an exhibition."
Kevin Box has made one aspect of origami all his own: He takes apart a folded piece to reveal what the origami looks like inside. As she sits next to a metal sculpture of a disassembled crane, Jennifer Box explains where that comes from.
"Every time you fold origami, when you unfold it, it has a beautiful star pattern," she says of the inner design. "That crane, when it's folded, it has this object you can see on the outside. People can look at it and think they know what it is. But this is all on the inside — and that was an important story for Kevin. He wanted to show what was on the inside; not just the beauty but the intricacy of it, and how we're like all the same but also different."
The Boxes have taken their work all over the country, and the Florigami exhibit debuted at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in 2022 before moving to the Fort Worth Botanic Garden in Texas last year. The first Box exhibition, Origami in the Garden, debuted 10 years ago at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden and has been working its way around the country.
The Boxes opened their home to the public last year to show pieces from Origami in the Garden, and the recent exhibit will be on display at the Box property on weekday mornings starting Monday, May 13, through November 1.
"It's so strange, but I love it so much," Jennifer Box says of welcoming the public to her home. "I've had dreams of being 90 and walking down the walkway and saying hi to folks and sitting on this rocking chair. We have no problem opening it to the public as long as people are respectful."
