This project started with wanting to make a sculptural peony from crepe paper. To understand more deeply what a peony is, I deconstructed one, grouping and sorting it’s different parts.
As I was deconstructing (and imagining how I would reconstruct it from crepe paper), I realized that this variety of peony petals don’t follow a simple circular or spiral pattern, as most flowers do. Rather, the petals are grouped into smaller bunches and those bunches follow a sort of circular spiral around the central structure.
I then did a deep dive into thinking through how I would group the petals, as well as what size and shape of petals would be in each grouping. Although the original peony had 220 petals, crepe paper cannot replicate the delicacy and strength of actual organic petals, and my first few experiments were much more compact than the original peony because I was trying to fit in the original number of petals rather than trying to convey the feeling of the original. I’ve started thinking that to convey the flower realistically – this might not always be my goal, it is in this case – I need to think of the process as being more like theatre and less about realism.
This project is an exploration of what happens when we slow down and look closely.
