“The harder the ‘I’ looks, the less there is to find that seems to be the ‘I’, to be what the ‘I’ is.
This may be a clue. Attention itself externalizes what it attends to. What I attend to is not me, the attender. The harder I attend to, say, my mouth, the more firmly it is placed at the end of my attention as an object. Experienced tissue, made the focus of attention, has the character of something I stand in relation to, rather than something that I am. Of course, if I were to search other parts of my body for flesh that I am, I would come back even more empty-handed. Feet, spleen, the colon are even less promising candidates for what I am than those stretches of my head—mainly in my mouth—that are flushed with my immediate self-awareness.”
— Raymond Tallis, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head (2008, pp. 45-46)
According to an old Japanese tradition, if you fold 1,000 origami cranes you may be granted a wish by a crane, such as a long life or prosperity.
Artist James Roper decided to take this idea one step further, pushing himself to create 10,000 origami flowers - making, on average, ten per day, everyday, for three years of his life. “I’ve always loved artworks built from multiple objects on a large scale such as Antony Gormley’s Field, so taking the idea from the Japanese tradition of creating 1,000 origami cranes (I had already done this), I decided to push this as far as I could,” he tells us.
Roper received no outside help and he calls the beautiful, shape-shifting installation Devotion. “The title refers to the act of creating it itself as well as religious practices found in Hinduism, the repetitive practice of mantras and the flowers used in devotional ceremonies,” he says.
Roper coincided the whole project with the three years it took him to finish his degree and he installed the piece as part of his final degree show.
(via lickypickystickyme)
Abandoned cabin in Straumsvík, Iceland. Photo by Óskar Steinn Ómarsson
I want to escape and go live in this cabin. Now.
