Should you head a mere 12 miles south of Santa Fe on Highway 14, you’ll happen upon Origami in the Garden from artist Kevin Box, a sprawling riparian outdoor space replete with wetlands, pathways, mountain views and, as of May 5, a sculptural ode to the ancient Japanese art of origami, or paper-folding. Everyone knows the cranes and boxes of the origami world, but renowned sculptor, constructionist and installation artist Box takes origami tenets and transfers them into larger metal versions—and it doesn’t end with cranes by a longshot.
Throughout the garden/exhibit space, you’ll find largescale representations of butterflies and flowers; hares and tortoises; and other flora and fauna. Really, the pieces represent the breadth of Box’s imagination and interests. A Santa Fean by way of Oklahoma, Georgia, New York City and Austin, Texas, Box is enthusiastic about sharing his art, the technical prowess of metallurgy and his designs based on the representational abstractions of origami. The medium, Box explains, teaches mathematical concepts, spatial reasoning and process development. So, on a bright spring morning, I walk through Box Studio and Sculpture Garden with the artist himself to see his origami sculptures in bronze, stainless steel and aluminum. On the pebbled paths, he explains his process.
“We rotate the work all the time based on whatever we have commissioned, or pieces not on tour are displayed here in our sculpture garden,” Box says. “We have two exhibits touring nationally that primarily go to botanical gardens—we created this exhibit for that purpose.”
Jumping back more than a decade to 2013, Box and his wife Jennifer I realized they had amassed a large enough collection of origami-inspired works that they could launch a touring show at botanical gardens throughout the country. The scale of the work, Box explains, makes outdoor settings more ideal than, say, the interior of a musum. Set and setting are key, he notes, in best observing his interpretations of folded paper, and his prior 10 years of experience as a sculptor-gardener adds cache.
“It’s those two things that go hand in hand,” he continues as we walk the grounds. “It started when we moved out into this beautiful landscape. I built this sculpture garden rock by rock as a meditation practice and a complimentary setting for my origami-inspired work.”
The seedling of the idea goes back 25 years, however, to a period during which, Box tells SFR, he pioneered a technique no other artist had attempted across the 6,000-year history of lost wax casting.
“I developed a process of taking a square piece of paper and folding it into an architectural shape representing a star,” he says. “I wanted to describe the architecture of the soul—what does that look like? What does that mean? What is the invisible realm of thought-emotion-feeling? How do you describe that as an artist? My first successful piece after two years of casting failures, is transitional; I call it ‘the unfolding’ because I felt like I had come into something that would work.”
Box created that first piece while studying Aristotle’s concept of Tabula Rasa—the blank slate.
“The idea of the blank page is, for me, the ultimate creative archetype,” Box muses, “because we all have to transform nothing into something. What is possible with a blank slate?”
After all, though origami is often conducted with paper emblazoned with various designs, its core ethos remains in transforming the fairly ordinary into something extraordinary, an Box carries that ethos to this day. The first piece on the trail at Origami in the Garden is powder-coated cast bronze that has stood outside and withstanding the elements for 23 years.
“Now we’re using aluminum and stainless steel, which are even more durable alloys,” Box says.
Durable is key when it comes to outdoor sculpture work, and though Box describes his process as “simple,” it breaks down to a 12-week and 35-step process. Even so, the premise remains fairly similar from paper to metal, all things considered.
“I learned how to fold an origami crane, and I got excited when I unfolded the crane,” Box says. “There is a star in the center, and also it starts with a square and is folded into a recognizable shape—like a crane, flower, boat, or plane—and any of those, when unfolded, contain within them a star. That was the ‘a-ha’ moment.”
Box wanted to express that inner realm of each piece.
“I believe in stars and that we are made of stardust,” he says. “We have starlight animating our souls, and I thought this could keep me busy for the rest of my life.”
And so he has, which has even attracted the eye of those working in origami at the highest level.
“Masters in Japan think I have elevated the work from a craft to high art,” Box tells SFR. “They were really excited about what I was doing at an origami festival I attended, and I realized there are modern and contemporary artists in this movement, and not just a repetition of traditional forms. When you unfold the origami model, you get all the distinct shapes. We can take the shapes, cut them out of paper, and build bigger and bigger models, ultimately to be realized in metal.”
Take the 18-foot-tall horse named Pegasus that stands at attention in Box’s garden as an example. Using origami as a model for stability—as in there is no hidden sculptural framework to keep the horse upright, the artwork itself becomes the engineering feat. to achieve this, it’s important to understand the fundamentals of the smaller paper version.
“If you can fold a paper origami shape, and it can stand on a tabletop or the palm of your hand, there’s structural integrity to that that should translate to metal at any scale,” Box explains. “Folded paper is stronger because it creates triangles and complex structural forms, and we can go way bigger than that in scale.”
To best understand and execute his visions, Box collaborates with origami artist RJ Lang, a pioneer when it comes to applying mathematical and engineering elements to the art of folded paper. Lang proved that origami can be broken down to its basic math, Box says, which unlocked even more room for creating from a single square of paper. Following that logic, Box was able to create myriad representational works for Origami in the Garden—but also to showcase how he created them.
“We want to wow you with the enchantment of all these critters running around in the garden,” he says, “then, typically in every exhibit, we have a space reserved to unfold these creatures and show you the majesty that’s outside of our realms of perception.”
The idea is to make the transparent more apparent, and to achieve an almost spiritual connection to the architecture of the soul. Origami is, ultimately, about more than folds and creases, like a means to grok the complexity of what we can’t see or of which we can’t quite make sense.
“The pattern on the unfolded paper is the point,” Box says.
To me, the architecture of the soul is a spiritual experience. It expresses the complexity of what we can’t see with our eyes, but we know it exists. The pattern on the unfolded paper is the point.
I see art history as a pendulum swinging. It goes toward representation. The most detailed, what are we capable of, and then we reject it, and it goes the opposite way to abstraction. Then we think that’s too abstract, and it’s gotten so minimal that there’s not even anything there. And so the pendulum moves back. This is my perception of art history, especially contemporary, within the last hundred years. I feel like I’m within that swing. The format of the subject matter, being the blank slate, is ultimately minimalism. A blank page cast in metal is an important part of the story.
We’ve seen 3 million people at the 24 botanical garden exhibits, and the reality is that this is the home where it all was born. It’s unique to create a sculpture garden—a public garden. I don’t think I could ever exhaust the subject matter of the blank page. I have found a lane no one else has stepped into for thousands of years. The most authentic thing we do is casting; I will continue to do that. This is a place that has supported creativity for thousands of years. At one point, 25,000 people were living in this area. The trade of pottery and artwork goes back forever, and I feel like I’m in that same lineage of creativity.”
Origami In The Garden: 9 am-1 pm Monday-Friday. $10 suggested donation (16 and under free). Box Sculpture Garden, 3453 Hwy. 14, (505) 471-4688
Kevin Box’s sculpture can also be seen at Kay Contemporary Art from May 16-June 4 2025.