10,000 Folds In A Single Sheet Of Paper: Viking Warrior Origami Goes Viral
Juho Könkkölä, an artist based in Finland, has created a wonderful piece of origami that has been going viral these days. His project “Viking, 2022” is created on one 95cm x 95cm sheet of Wenzhou paper. “This has been probably the most difficult and time-consuming origami project so far. It has the most folds of all my previous pieces,” the artist says on Instagram.
Juho has folded origami for around 20 years. In an interview with demilked, he revealed, “I started folding simple origami as a little kid, and it has been a great way for me to spend time when I have some paper in my hands. One day in 2018 I was bored, so I wanted to try to make my own creations instead of folding from instructions. Since then I have been designing and folding these human figures.”
Check out some images of his incredible project “Viking, 2022” in the gallery below. And if you wish to see his projects in person, you can find his origami artworks exhibited in the “Small is Beautiful” exhibition in New York for the next few months.
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
Talking about his inspirations, the artist said, “It is a long story how this became my choice for art to make, I didn’t really choose it, or at least I never planned to do it like this. More like it chose me in this. In university of applied sciences, where I studied other kinds of art, such as digital arts in 2D and 3D, and photography, I didn’t really focus on origami to do as art, but I liked to do it in my free time after school. At the end of the school in 2020, somehow my origami works got into one big exhibition and from there it really blew out of my hands.”
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
Juho further elaborated, “The creative process has many parts, it can take months or even years before my inspiration transforms into a finished figure. I search for inspiration and study the characters from books, the internet, museums, and even movies and other media. Then I plan how the figure can be folded from the one sheet of paper, arrange the features so that they have enough paper, and then design all the thousands of folds. Then I take the sheet of paper and fold it, and it can take even hundreds of hours.
The process is very patience consuming, most of the time is spent on looking at some folds on a square, but mainly the difficulty of creating these is the part that keeps me constantly interested in creating these. I always want to create more and more difficult origami and push my limits on what is possible with just one square sheet of paper.”
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
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Image source: Juho Könkkölä
Got wisdom to pour?