Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Naoki Onogawa

Japanese artist Naoki Onogawa has been fascinated with the traditional art of origami since he was a child.

 

Now, he incorporates the popular craft into his own artwork.

Using nothing more than his hands, the artist folds hundreds of tiny origami cranes that are small enough to fit on the tip of his finger.

 

Inspired by the legend of the 1000 cranes and the story of Sadako Sasaki, Onogawa folds hundreds of miniature origami cranes that later become bonsai trees of various colors and styles.

Those minuscule paper creatures are used as leaves on the delicate branches of his asymmetrical tree-like sculptures.

 

“Origami cranes sometimes feel like a solitary ceremony filled with prayers, entrusting the feeling of having nowhere to go, and going back and forth to places other than this world,” Onogawa explains.

“I can’t express it well in words, but the paper cranes I’m folding up now may be the result of such ‘prayers’.”

 

“By layering paper cranes on the threads and blessings of nature and such things and incorporating them into my work, I have created a “place” for paper cranes.”

 

More of Naoki Onogawa’s inspirational work can be found at https://naoki-onogawa.com.

Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Ekaterina ‘Kate’ Lukasheva

 

Ekaterina ‘Kate’ Lukasheva is an incredible Origami artist and designer from Moscow, Russia.

The artist has had a fascination with puzzles and construction sets since childhood and first discovered origami in her teens.

With its intricate folds and geometric patterns, there’s a lot of math in origami and Lukasheva would later graduate with honors from Moscow State Lomonosov University as a mathematician and programmer.

As Origami has come to describe a broad field with a number of niche disciplines, Lukasheva’s artwork focuses primarily around modular origami and Kusudama.

Japanese kusudama is created by sewing or gluing multiple identical pyramidal units in various shapes. Lukasheva does all this, but without glue or sewing.

All of her origami is made from one single sheet of paper.

According to the artist: “For me origami is a big conundrum. If you have a blank sheet you compose a conundrum out of it and you assemble this puzzle.

“Since the possibilities of the sheet are endless, I get an endless source of interesting puzzles.”

More of Ekaterina Lukasheva‘s amazing work can be found at https://kusudama.me/.