Duchamp Played Chess; I Made Cranes

Brief exhibition walk through of "Duchamp Played Chess; I Made Cranes". First shown at FERREIRA PROJECTS in April 2008. This body of work emerges from Ford's fascination with the ancient Japanese practice of Origami and begins to illustrate how Eastern Art has become Westernised.

Like Marcel Duchamp, who in 1923 declared that he was no longer a practicing artist and instead both played and studied chess for the rest of his life to the near exclusion of all other activity, so Ford became disillusioned with his art practice and, in 2007, decided to dedicate his time to making Origami Cranes instead of creating any new work. He became obsessed by the paper folding process and intrigued by this ancient art.

In a cyclical way he turned his studies into patterns, created his own paper designs and used these to fold more cranes. Ford has also created a computer animation of infinitely spinning rainbow cranes and large intricate pattern prints, inspired by the numerous Origami papers used, which references the more contemporary Japanese culture.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• James
• Ford
• visual
• arts
• performing
• media
• gallery
• exhibition
• duchamp
• thousand
• origami
• cranes