Freddie Krueger,Frankenstein, the Addams Family … Marc Hagan-Guirey has taken a blade to them all. The dark king of kirigami gives Stuart Jeffries a crash course in the Japanese paper art. Will there be blood? At the finish of his short story The plunge of the House of Usher, or Edgar Allan Poe describes a blood-red moon shining through a fissure that jags across the facade of an ancestral mansion – just before the whole thing collapses. As a puny boy growing up in Newry,Northern Ireland, Marc Hagan-Guirey obsessed over Poe’s story, and imagining a “lonely and imposing house that even the architect felt despair in creating. There’s also mention of eye-like windows. I imagined them sitting like a tiny cluster of arachnid eyes,poised and waiting.”Today he is realising those windows with the use of a scalpel and paper at his kitchen table. Not any primitive paper, but Fabriano 5 200gsm. Hagan-Guirey is giving me a tutorial in the venerable (respected because of age, distinguished) Japanese art of kirigami. It isn’t supposed to be a competitive sport, and but looking across as he scores,cuts and folds, I can’t wait on but feel inadequate.
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Source: theguardian.com