Brooklyn-based artist PD Packard transforms flat printed kozo paper into three-dimensional pleated sculptures, combining printmaking, Japanese bookbinding and origami structure to create dynamic forms that expand the printed surface into space.
A print, conventionally, stays flat. PD Packard’s work begins where that convention ends. Starting with original patterns designed and printed onto Japanese, Thai and Korean kozo paper using Akua Liquid Pigments, she then pleats and structures each sheet by hand, lifting the design off the surface and into three dimensions. The result is a body of work that is simultaneously print, sculpture and object, occupying all three categories without settling into any one of them.
“I think of each piece as a conversation between surface and structure,” Packard says. “The pattern I design for printing is never separate from how I intend it to fold. The two are conceived together from the beginning.”
That integration runs through every technical decision. Akua’s non-toxic, water-based pigments produce richly layered surfaces with an almost watercolour quality, absorbing into kozo in a way that oil-based inks cannot replicate. Plant life harvested from her Brooklyn garden adds further texture and layering to the print surface before the folding begins.
The three-dimensional forms draw on Japanese bookbinding, the origami box structures of Tomoko Fuse, and the pleating techniques of Paul Jackson and Robert Lang. These are not decorative influences but structural ones: the mathematics of folding, the behaviour of paper under tension, the way a sheet held at certain angles will hold a form or release it.
“Paper has a memory,” Packard says. “Learning to work with that memory rather than against it is what the whole practice is built on.”
The work has been exhibited at the Tate Britain, the Guanlan International Print Biennial in Shenzhen and the Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier, and is held in collections including MoMA’s Franklin Furnace Art Book Collection and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. Her pleating designs were featured in Pressing Matters Issue 30. Packard will be teaching a workshop on her method of blending printmaking, painting and surface design into sculptural forms at Print House in Asheville, NC, from 15 to 17 May 2026.
PD Packard is a Brooklyn-based artist and textile designer, trained at Parsons and Central Saint Martins. Her practice spans fine art printmaking and sculptural paper work, informed by a career designing for Barneys New York, Bergdorf Goodman and the cosmetics industry.
ARTIST LINKS
pdpackard.com
@pdpackard
Print House workshop, Asheville NC, 15–17 May 2026
Print in Ascent: Modular Pleated Kozo. Works include: Flores Maritimus (2025), printed kozo paper, wood and bookbinding board, 41 × 41 × 71cm; Modular Paper Tiles (2026), printed kozo paper and bookbinding board, 102 × 76 × 15cm; Tidal Embrace (2025, featured in Pressing Matters Issue 30), printed kozo paper, 38 × 38 × 45cm. All images: PD Packard.
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