San Francisco Center for the Book

This is a two-session online workshop. All times are Pacific.

The 20th-century Czech paper engineer Vojtěch Kubašta is known for many things: he was spectacularly prolific; he served as writer, illustrator and engineer for his books; and relevant to what follows, he favored a single approach to paper engineering—the cut-in structure. Cut-in pop-ups, a.k.a. kirigami, are generally formed by cutting and folding a single sheet of paper, yielding elegant and efficient structures.

Participants will build 12 no-glue/no-thread structures using a kit of pieces pre-cut from simple white cardstock. The focus is pure mechanism, but with some light application to suggest possibilities for use. Ultimately, the structures are gluelessly bound and tucked into a sturdy box.

This four-hour workshop is divided over two sessions, with time in-between for independent work.

This workshop uses a mailed kit of pre-cut pieces. Students will be required to provide a USPS-friendly mailing address for their kit. No international students, please, due to high kit shipping costs and transit times.

All SFCB online workshops are recorded. Video links will be available for eight weeks after class.

Tools/Materials to Bring:

- mailed kit of pieces provided by instructor

AND

- bone folder
- microspatula
- tweezers
- self-healing mat
- x-acto knife
- pencil
- ruler

About the Instructor:

Shawn Sheehy has been teaching book arts courses and workshops since 2001. His broadsides and artist book editions have been collected by such institutions as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Library of Congress, UCLA, and Harvard. Sheehy’s trade pop-up books Welcome to the Neighborwood and Beyond the Sixth Extinction (both mass-market versions of previous artist books) were published by Candlewick and have won numerous awards. Sheehy served as director of The Movable Book Society from 2018 to 2023. He holds an MFA in Book Arts from Columbia College Chicago.