Artist Information
Artist
Crawford, PatriciaRole
Designer and folderNotes
About the artist:
Patricia Alice Crawford (née Tait), born in 1940 in Philadelphia, was a stay-at-home mother whose lifelong curiosity and inventive spirit led her to explore a wide range of crafts and technologies. Though she had some early exposure to origami, her serious engagement with the art began in her mid-20s after discovering Robert Harbin’s Paper Magic. This pivotal moment launched her into a brief but highly creative period of origami design, further nurtured by her contact with Lillian Oppenheimer and The Origami Center. Crawford’s origami journey unfolded across two major productive phases between 1963 and 1974, during which she designed and documented 44 original models.
Renowned for her intuitive folding process, Crawford often conceptualized complex models entirely in her mind before executing them flawlessly on paper. Her most iconic creations, such as the “Unicorn” and “Full-rigged Ship,” exemplify her innovative shift from flat forms to three-dimensional work, as well as her use of color change (where both sides of the paper are revealed in the finished model.) Though she stepped away from the origami community after 1974 to pursue other creative interests like miniature shipbuilding and embroidered crochet, her influence endured. Her models were prominently featured in Robert Harbin’s origami books throughout the 1970s and later included in JC Nolan’s Creating Origami (1991).
(This synthesis is based on a text published in the Community for Creators website, and written by J.C. Nolan.)