Folding Sculpture

Back in the 1990's I was exploring the basic geometric shapes, Square, Circle, Triangle, and limiting myself to those shapes, experimenting on what I could do with them. This was two-dimensional work on paper, canvas and wood. It was an exercise. Experimentation. Severely handicapping oneself, to force creativity.
Moving that idea into the three dimensional world, I experimented with the Cube, Sphere, Cone (or Pyramid) shapes. These creative experiments were interesting exercises which did bear fruit occasionally. At one point I focused on the Cube for a while. That's when I started developing my folding sculptures.
I began by exploring how I could fold flat, square shapes into a Cube. This led to a series of Folding Cube sculptures. (You can read about a few of them on my art web site: Cube Sculptures). Those in turn led to other folding sculptures series.
I'd always liked Origami and enjoyed folding all kinds of things I came across in books. I liked being able to make three dimensional things out of a flat sheet of paper. This may have laid the foundation for my moving in this direction. But this folding sculpture of mine was different, though I got some good ideas from Origami. As I built my first Folding Cube sculptures, I realized I'd stumbled onto something very interesting. The first Folding Cubes I made had a delightful tactile quality about them. They folded and unfolded nicely. They felt good in the hands. And they made a pleasing clacking sound when they closed into the folded cube shape. In short, they were fun to play with. Instead of just painting them with plain colors or decorating them just for the sake of decoration, I chose to paint them in a sort of abstract, Modern Art style, with a bit of wear, as if they'd been around, and handled for a while. Now I had something that would look at home in the Museum of Modern Art. An executive desk toy.
That's the thing. It was like a toy, but it was a serious piece of art at the same time. That's subversive. It's not mocking Art. It is liberating Art from its ivory tower. You're not allowed to touch sculpture or a painting, let alone play with it (unless you own it). It's also a piece of sculpture that might look different every time you put it down. It's a piece of sculpture that, though it might be rearranged, it never loses its essence.
By treating the surfaces of the the Cube and its folding components as a painting I was blurring the distinction between a painting and a sculpture. Was it a painted sculpture, or was it a sculptural painting?   Also; is that a single painting, or several paintings, or some kind of morphing painting? I love that these sculptures have the qualities of a painting and those of sculpture without being completely either one.
The whole idea with the Folding series is that the pieces look like sculptures, and that you then discover that you can manipulate them. They should look good just sitting there on a shelf or a table. They should feel good and be fun to play with. When you put the piece down, you can choose which state, or position, or "pose"  to display the piece. Which, in a sense, makes the manipulator of the sculpture a collaborator.