Cristian Marianciuc

“Every crane tells a story.” And this is the story of Cristian Marianciuc, a young paper artist from Romania who taught himself the art of origami and started to build paper cranes following therapy during a period of personal struggle. “The starting point is always a traditional origami crane, then I add decorations,” he says. “I spend fifteen hours on one single piece, and I've made around 5,000 of them. It’s a sort of visual diary for myself. The repetitive nature of what I do is therapeutic.” With a professional background in diplomacy, linguistics and foreign languages, he describes himself as a self-taught artist.

Over the past five years, Cristian Marianciuc has developed a very personal style comprising delicately hand-cut paper decorations, which he then carefully attaches to the bodies of paper origami cranes. He draws his inspiration for his adorned origami cranes from nature, in particular birds’ anatomy, flowers, mythology, folklore and more recently perfumes. His creations bridge ancestral traditions of origami and contemporary innovation by combining Cristian's Eastern European heritage and ancestral Japanese craft.

The choice of paper and origami was a very personal one for Cristian Marianciuc. He saw paper as such a ubiquitous medium and origami such a meaningful artform that they resonated with him on a very personal level. The origami crane has a particularly meaningful symbolism since it is linked to the story of Sadako Sasaki and her struggle with leukaemia after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of Cristian’s sisters also succumbed to leukaemia, so it was a very personal choice for him.

Magnae Chartae Exhibition