“Oh flock of heavenly cranes, cover us with your wings.” ~From a traditional Japanese prayer, which Hiroshima victim Sadako Sasaki’s mother read to her daughter while the young girl was battling leukemia. Sadako’s dream was to create 1,000 origami cranes to be healed; she folded 644.
Photo by Frau Bob. (Follow “onbeing” on instagram)
One Crease, Much Beauty
by Susan Leem, associate producer
The documentary Between the Folds won a Peabody Award this year for chronicling origami artists who reinterpret the world through folding paper. Though the film features elaborate technical mastery and the possibilities for physics, Paul Jackson, an origami teacher from Tel Aviv, Israel, describes a broader philosophy by demonstrating the elegance of a single fold of paper and the unexpected shapes that can be created:
“This is the lesson of one crease, that you don’t need to have a very strong knowledge of origami technique to make something beautiful that you feel is in some way significant and interesting.”
