Kate Cotching Then he realised there were people involved paper, 2002

'What is a fold?' asked curator Robyn Phelan as we chatted at the opening of this exhibition. At that moment, I began to think of it through definitions and abstract actions, but after seeing the works in this exhibition, I can see that the question creates a delta of variations and possibilities. I can imagine that any set of artists would produce a range of intriguing answers: this particular group of artists showed that folding a piece of paper begins a transformation which starts as a stiffened structure, goes on to a geometry which can be actual or representational, thereby moving into a way of thinking and thence into the imagination. This conceptual sequence was enhanced by the exhibition layout which set out the works in a line from the reception desk to that room around the corner at the end of the gallery.

The gradual shift in the works from the actual to the representational was begun at the entrance to this show. Pandarosa’s installation, given the cryptic title of B2D3rd, was a somewhat ordinary bent/stapled/glued/drawn-on/etc pair of paper walls either side of an extraordinary mat made of interlocked upright strips of paper. This grid was progressively folded by people standing on it when passing through into the rest of the gallery. By the end of the exhibition, it was a bit frayed, but about half of it was still unfolded, evidence of the strength of the paper structure and perhaps of the careful behaviour of gallery visitors.

The surprising strength shown by the paper mat was given a spatial form by the large work next in line, Modular 4 by Enlai Hooi. In this work, paper was made into thick sticks of a triangular cross-section by a combination of sharp and blunt folds. These modular units were glued end to end in a three-dimensional diamond lattice and the whole suspended from the ceiling as a cloud, apparently weightless, potentially infinite, but rigid and clearly geometric. At the edges of the cloud, the unglued tabs revealed the importance of that particular fold for our world of envelopes and boxes and all of their derivatives.

Nel Linssen's Necklace 1, 2, 3 also used the fold as a stiffening technique. Each of her necklaces was a thick coral-like ring of paper medallions or deformed discs strung together. Each paper disc was cut or folded, with the consecutive indents rotated along the bracelet to create tactile, flickering lines along the necklaces’ loop. These works were as flexible as a reptile in one direction and as stiff as dried wood in the other. Their geometry was destined for the hand, arm, neck and shoulders, and showed how the paper fold can contribute significantly to a composition without being central to it.

Kate Cotching's crumpled paper jacket titled Then he realised there were people involved, introduced representation. This sculpture used paper to represent woven cloth through a weave-like pattern of short cut-out lines in the paper. To emphasize the representation, the jacket was sewn together from large paper pieces with very visible stitching where this would not normally be. In this work, folds were softer, rounder, more irrational than the works set up before it in the gallery. The folds were beguiling because of their distortions of the geometric cut-outs and the distortion of the jacket form, itself a kind of distortion of the upper body.

Representation of the body was foremost in Ruth Hutchinson’s work, where the fold was used to provide a symmetrical Left and Right basis for the contemplation of body image. Her framed drawings, Charting series, elaborated this dichotomy into a presentation of right and wrong ways of thinking. But her take-away piece was a small square of paper actually folded in half. The size of a business card, this fold had a symmetrically placed horizontal section through a vagina and anus printed on the outside and a printed pop-up two-sided brain on the inside. Left and Right were thus combined with top and bottom through the inside and outside of a single fold.

Simone Slee's Form Connotes Action consisted of two videos, recording short performances using bellows made from coloured card, her real folded paper objects thus being used as a tool or prop. One video showed the bellows being opened and closed between two similar heads (presumably the ‘sisters’ nominated in the work’s list of materials); the other between the knees of one person. The sound of paper creasing, of air being displaced, and the breath-like rhythm of the ins and outs produced a field of associations about dreams and sex, pairs and singles, the imaginary and the palpable, but always as unusual pairs, never resolving and always folding - to use the word at its most metaphoric - from one pair to another.

The question this exhibition really answered was ‘How is a fold to be known?’ As an exhibition, Fold straddled the design/craft/art spectrum with ease, with all the folds gaining from the presence of their adjacent variants. The pleasure of just looking at and touching folded paper was amplified by connecting the fold to thought and imagination, and this influence also went back the other way. The conventional fold reduces the area of material it affects; in this exhibition a set of unconventional folds did the opposite.