Origami

Whilst browsing in Hobbycraft over the weekend I found a selection of origami paper, and picked out the pieces that matched with my colour palette to try some folding with. I then looked online for some free origami patterns, bearing my MSA photos in mind. I found a great website, origami-fun.com which had a large variety of different paper instructions available.

With Easter just having past, I looked at the patterns for bunnies and found a couple. The most interesting was a blow - up bunny which formed a cube with ears coming out the top. The ears resemble the arches from Grosvener building and the cube reminded me of the transparent grid-like roof in the main exhibition space. So, I decided to try it out. The result was really striking; the contrast between the white and blue was eye-catching, creating movement and its 3D nature appeals to me a lot. I like that it wouldn't obviously be recognisable as a bunny when taken out of context.

Looking for something geometric, this star box caught my eye. I tried it out (reading the diagrammatic instructions can be tricky) before helping Safia to make one.

The finished product

The first thing I noticed was that the opening of the box was the same size as the bunny cube, so I put the two together to see how the colours would work. The box is the colour of the Grosvenor arches, and is the same tone as the ears' blue, but I think a different combination might work better.

Trying out colour combinations will be far less time consuming by using my chosen materials rather than by making origami models each time, so further colour work is my priority at the moment.

Another pattern which appeared instantly suitable was one for a bird, and I imagine that a large flock of origami pigeons would look really good. However I then remembered an exhibition in Liverpool at the start of the year with bright pigeon models in the Walker Gallery, and felt that this clearly wasn't an original idea. It would be better to experiment with the bunny - box shape and other paper folding and cutting samples to make something new that relates really well to MSA.

I decided to use the colours from my MSA photos to make my own stripy origami sheet. I selected out the primary colours to start with, as I knew they would be bright, and go well together. 

I like the contrast between the muted back of the paper and the bright front, and if I made 175 of these cubes, some could be plain, some patterned, and the designs could be taken from my MMU photos.