Production Process of Paper Quilt Artwork

The “paper quilt” got its name from a comment of a gallery owner in the Netherlands: “the artwork, though made of paper, makes me feel warm, and thus is a paper quilt”. A paper quilt artwork is created by cutting tiny pieces of colored paper with a cutter and then laminating them one by one with tweezers. It sometimes takes 4 months to complete one paper quilt artwork. The process of making a paper quilt artwork is a little bit unique, beginning with selecting words suited to the theme of creation. At the beginning the theme is just expressed as row of words such as “warm”, “like fierce”, but they will finally be turned into a poem. I do this artwork in order to clarify what I want to express by verbalization and draw the rendering concretely in my mind. Doing this also prevents what I want to express from being blurred. After this work, a small-sized initial sketch is drawn,

Parts are pasted with tweezers, so sometimes the workbench is all covered with the paper pieces.

and when the shape is determined, the sketch is magnified into a full-sized sketch. Next, the best lines are extracted from the full-sized sketch. Since the image on the colors and shape has been fixed by this time point, another color simulation is hardly needs. There is not a draft for detailed patterns, either. While making a paper quilt artwork, I always determine the pieces to use on the spot and laminate them the instant I make a decision. Accordingly, no same two paper quilt artworks exist though their pattern is the same. Like other arts, the artwork is truly one and only production in the world.