Lemmy’s Gift is an artist book with the paper patterns to make eight observational and buildable geometric shapes; complete with a storage box and instructional zine.
These shapes are the key forms and techniques behind the paper sculptures in my artistic practice. If you can master building these forms, you will find their structures repeated in almost any object you hope to recreate in paper. Humans invented paper out of the desire to leave record; sharing their ideas with as many people as possible. Paper is the material of childhood; children, without hesitation, make anything they want on and out of paper.
It is then, no surprise that these foundational shapes mirror Fröbel Gifts, the nearly 200 year old series of educational playthings developed by Friedrich Fröbel. Fröbel believed a lifetime of learning and the discovery of the world could begin with a simple wooden cube. I believe a lifetime of creativity begins with the limitless potential of a simple piece of paper. Lemmy’s Gift is just the introduction.
This first edition is typeset in TW Cent MT and printed by risograph and laser print on French Paper. The shapes are plotter cut on Colorplan Paper. Designed, conceived, and published by Imin Yeh and their imprint ELHymns. The cover design borrows heavily from Observational Geometry by William T Campbell.
Lemmy’s Gift was made possible in part by generous support from Play Mountain Exchange, a project directed by Isla Hansen, funded by the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA.
