May 2021 After Hours Art Walk: Travis Nolan, “Folds”
Travis Nolan Artist Bio
Travis Nolan is a nineteen-year-old origami artist from Dallas, Texas. Travis designed the pictured models and folded each from a single square sheet of paper, without using cuts or glue.
Travis began folding origami at the age of seven, when he learned a few simple models from his father, and later from friends. Interested, he began to look into the art form, and was blown away when he saw pictures of intricate folds from artists like Satoshi Kamiya. Travis has been folding regularly since. He learned to fold complex models in elementary and middle school, and received the book Origami Design Secrets, Second Edition by Robert Lang in 2016. This 800+ page book details the theory behind intentional design of origami models, and it changed the origami world. Having read and studied this book, Travis dove into the world of design. Since then he has developed dozens of original designs and received international recognition for his work. Notable recognition includes winning a scholarship to attend the OrigamiUSA convention in New York in 2018, taking third place in the own-design category of the International Origami Internet Olympiad in 2018, which had participants from more than fifty countries, and designing and folding a model for the cover of Wealth Made Easy in 2019.
Travis now specializes in 22.5 degree design of prehistoric creatures, thanks to his interest in paleontology. Travis is in the process of creating a book of diagrams to fold some of his models. He is attending Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he is majoring in biology and geological sciences, and intends to pursue a career in paleontology. When he is not folding origami, Travis is digging up the fossils of 287 million year old animals with the Whiteside Museum in Seymour, Texas.
Finally, Travis’s story would be incomplete without mentioning Paper for Water. Paper for Water is an origami-based charity in Dallas. Volunteers at Paper for Water fold origami ornaments and trade them for donations to water wells around the world. In 2018, Travis started a project with a few friends to raise twenty thousand dollars to fund a well in Kenya. After fifteen months of folding ornaments, running events, and soliciting donations, they had managed to surpass their goal, raising thirty thousand dollars. The well now services more than a thousand people at St Michaels Muluwa Secondary School near Butere, Kenya.
