Origami Textiles
Emilie Palle Holm’s uses structures from origami and textiles to create pieces that morph into different forms and textures (image: Peter William Vinther).
Textile designer Emilie Palle Holm’s sculptures are shapeshifters. A form that resembles a tube threaded with two arm-bands morphs into a wheel, with both shapes held up entirely by folds of fabric. Meanwhile, a column turns inside out to reveal waves of soft yellow and green wool that resemble the fur of a monster from a children’s TV show.
“I wanted to challenge the two dimensionality of weaving,” Palle Holm says. “I have always been fascinated by origami folding, and I thought that flat, woven fabric was quite similar in format to paper.” Aiming to design a textile that included a map of creases that would guide the origami folds, Palle Holm spent a year and a half programming a digital jacquard loom to create the patterns by experimenting with different combinations of materials and varying the densities of threads and interlacing points within the weave. “I succeeded in creating a structure that was strong and flexible enough, and had sharp folds,” she explains. The textiles are named Oriori, a title that references the repetitive nature of the folding process, and artfully describes her technique. “‘Ori’ means folding in Japanese, and ‘Kami’ means paper,” Palle Holm says. “But a friend told me that ‘Ori’ additionally describes a woven textile or cloth – so ‘Ori Ori’ actually [relates to] folding woven textiles.”
When turned inside out, Palle Holm’s origami textile is covered in shaggy tassels (image: Peter William Vinther).
Palle Holm starts by making basic origami structures in paper before slowly changing the angles of the folding lines or combining these shapes with traditional textiles techniques to create more unusual forms. One piece, for example, features a lozenge-shaped origami base topped with a ruff that resembles the cuff of a sleeve, a detail she wouldn’t have been able to make using folded paper alone. “On the loom, you can combine [these two shapes] together,” she says. The finished piece looks like a pineapple, the fruit’s scales rendered in lime green fabric folded like rows of paper fortune tellers, and the ruff funnelling outwards like a crown. When the piece is turned inside out, however, the structured pineapple scales are replaced by tassels which fade from red to purple. “I use colour to enhance the transformation they go through,” she says. “I wanted to incorporate a contrasting texture to the rigid origami structure, so I created these fluffy details that are a bit more related to classical textiles, which are soft and can drape.” While she uses linen and cotton to create a more stable structure, she adds woollen threads to create softer details, such as a checkerboard of pom-poms or waves of shaggy tassels.
Palle Holm’s textiles are designed with the final form in mind, which avoids wasting any fabric during the process of cutting and sewing (image: Peter William Vinther).
While most textiles have a reverse side which reveals loose threads, obvious stitching, and other secrets of its construction, Palle Holm’s pieces are designed to have every part of the textile proudly on show. “I think it’s a strength that most people overlook,” she says. “If you incorporate both sides then people interact more with your work, because there is more to investigate.” In order to encourage people to interact with her textiles more inquisitively, Palle Holm prefers to present them as sculptures. “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, this could be a vase, or a lamp,’” she says. “But I think it keeps the imagination open for people to see it in a sculptural form – otherwise function becomes the primary thing, and the material is secondary.” Nevertheless, Palle Holm sees the techniques she is developing as part of an evolution towards designing textiles that can become clothes or sculptures without wasting any fabric through the process of cutting or sewing, referencing the work of designers Kelly Konnings and Sarah Brunnhuber, who use similar techniques to create more sustainable fashion. “I think there is still a lot of unexplored potential in creating the form at the same time as the textile,” she says.
Nevertheless, Palle Holm’s work is more overtly architectural than other designers creating no-waste textiles, with each piece specifically crafted to hold its own weight without the support of a frame or a body. “It could be really interesting to do a project with an architect,” she reflects. Recently, she created Woven Voxel, a tapestry of cubes that reference 3D pixels, which was nominated for the 2025 Biennale Award at the Danish Biennale for Craft & Design – and she is now exploring how to create multidimensional structures using hand-weaving. “When I work on the industrial jacquard loom, I can only use regular threads, but with hand weaving, I can put in other materials,” she says. “I’m working a lot with wooden sticks that I can place into different layers to achieve a three-dimensional form.” By adding more structured materials into their construction, Palle Holm’s pieces will continue to build on her practice of blurring the lines between flexibility and geometry, softness and solidity, architecture and object.
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown