Seeking a pet project to lift his sullen spirits, self-taught origami artist Cristian Marianciuc proposed to fold 100 paper cranes in 100 days. But after finishing, it seemed a shame to stop there and he was driven to keep making cranes.
One hundred cranes became one thousand. And eventually, his hobby turned into a rare profession of fusing papercraft with a host of mixed media—expanding beyond the tactile, visual experience to incorporate music, fragrance, and even Mother Nature into his artwork.
Marianciuc, 32, who grew up in a small town in northeastern Romania, was introduced to origami while studying diplomacy and foreign languages on a college scholarship in Sydney, Australia. At the time, he thought little of the art form but after three years of working for an NGO in Moldova, he had trouble readjusting to life back on the continent….