James Ford

Marcel Duchamp claimed to have abandoned art for playing chess, but then secretly worked on his last major piece, Étant donnés, for 20 years. In 2007 Ford became disillusioned with his art practice and decided to dedicate all his time to making Origami Cranes instead of creating any new work. He slowly became obsessed by the paper folding process and, at the same time as making cranes, began to produce studies of them. Unbeknownst to himself, Ford was developing a new body of work. During this period Ford folded 1,000 cranes, using a variety of coloured and patterned papers, which were later displayed as a large installation. An accompanying set of studies take the form of Gouache paintings and small watercolour sketches. Ford also created a digital animation of nine infinitely spinning rainbow cranes, displayed as a large projection.