Arnold Zwicky's Blog

In the mail today, lovable pop-up penguins! In laser-cut kirigami!

(#1) From Gadi Niram: “I figure it never hurts to send you penguins” (there’s a Page on this blog on my postings about penguins)

From the company’s site:

Lovepop creates beautiful laser-cut pop-up cards designed on ship-building software and handcrafted in the ancient art form of kirigami.

Some of the cards are wonderfully elaborate, little kirigami treasures.

The penguins. More from the Boston-based company’s site, about this particular card:

Penguins in Love 3D card: A happy penguin and his fish dinner are laser-cut onto the front of this deep blue card. Inside, two 3D penguins sweetly embrace on a heart-shaped glacier beside their fish meals. A beautiful Antarctic paradise filled with purple and green hues sets the backdrop for this loved-up pair!

Inspiration for the Penguins in Love Card: Our designer Cindy was inspired by a fact she read that penguins mate for life and share a special penguin call to find each other when they are in their large colonies. She charmingly calls penguins “nature’s true romantics.”

Occasions for the Penguins in Love Card: The Penguins in Love card is the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for your mate for life or a special someone who loves these wonderful antarctic animals.

The penguins themselves are studiously identical in gendering. Both have eyelashes — often signifying female vs. male in cartoons — so that’s pretty much a wash. You can buy this card for a beloved in any sort of pairing with you, or merely (as Gadi did) for a friend (like me) who’s into penguins, allowing for an interpretation in which the penguins are a couple of whatever kind suits you. Sweet.

The lovepop guys. More from the company’s site:

(#2) Sweetly geeky buddies Wombi Rose and John Wise

Our Founders: Wombi Rose and John Wise became best friends at Webb Institute training to become naval architects. On a Harvard Business School trip to Vietnam, Wombi and John discovered the incredible paper art form of kirigami and were inspired. The duo took their engineering background and combined this ancient art with the sliceform structure used in ship design to develop Slicegami™, and Lovepop was born.

Background 1. From Wikipedia:

Webb Institute is a private undergraduate engineering college in Glen Cove, New York. Each graduate of Webb Institute earns a Bachelor of Science degree in naval architecture and marine engineering.

Background 2. Kirigami is, roughly, a hybrid of origami (artistic paper folding) and paper cutting as an art form.

Background 3. Same-sex friendship. Rose and Wise are straight buddies, and it’s nice to see them unself-consciously displaying this relationship. I write a lot on this blog about affectionate and sexual same-sex relationships, especially between men, but (with luck) we all thrive within a set of different intersecting networks of social relationships: among them, family, same-sex friendship networks, and affectionate and sexual pairings. These networks are largely independent of one another.

The quick point here is that it would be silly to look at #2 and see a pair of queers. (Not that there’s anything wrong with pairs of queers; in fact, I chronicle that world.)

lovepop in the larger world. The company sees itself as seriously committed to its neighborhoods (in Boston and Cambridge) and also to  the larger world. So, in plague time, this 4/13 Twitter posting:

Lovepop putting our first batch of 10,000 face shields into production. Working on gowns, head covers, coveralls, and shoe covers next with commercial lab testing this week.

They’ve been repurposing their production facilities. Good on them.

This entry was posted on April 27, 2020 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and business, Penguins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.