The grand folds of life

• • Diana makes origami creations for fashion runways
• • Her ephemeral works are unfolded for recycling
• • She exhibited her first retrospective in 2022, spanning 24 years of work

Diana Gamboa Murra’s earliest memory of folding paper goes back to age eight, though her father, master origamist himself, insists she started much earlier, at three. Since then, every crease has been a cumulative life’s work of dynamic meditation, fold within fold in a fractal dance of geometric creations. She is known in the fashion industry as a role model for her ephemeral runway collections and considers herself a 'paper weaver', for she is not intimidated by paper’s fragility against the needle. Diana weaves her way through paper with various techniques, such as embroidery and crochet, which she learned from her mother’s Palestinian ancestry. Her work in Colombia constitutes a meshing of cultures – Japanese and Arabic – and in essence, that is also who she is.