Seeking a pet project to lift his sullen spirits, self-taught origami artist Cristian Marianciuc proposed to fold 100 paper cranes in 100 days. But after finishing, it seemed a shame to stop there and he was driven to keep making cranes.
One hundred cranes became one thousand. And eventually, his hobby turned into a rare profession of fusing papercraft with a host of mixed media—expanding beyond the tactile, visual experience to incorporate music, fragrance, and even Mother Nature into his artwork.
Marianciuc, 32, who grew up in a small town in northeastern Romania, was introduced to origami while studying diplomacy and foreign languages on a college scholarship in Sydney, Australia. At the time, he thought little of the art form but after three years of working for an NGO in Moldova, he had trouble readjusting to life back on the continent.
Little did he expect his remedy would come in the form of an origami crane.
Practice Makes Perfect
“I just wanted to somehow deal with it in a creative and positive way,” he told The Epoch Times. He first began creatively cutting out pages of his diary, cutting them into squares, before writing a special message on them—either for himself or someone else—and then folding them into a crane.January 1, 2015, was when he posted his first crane on Instagram. Although it was “a very intimate, very personal project,” at the same time it became “quite public” from its inception. “I was a bit apprehensive because I had done a lot of similar things,” he said. “I quickly got bored. But with this one, for some reason, it clicked.”
Working full-time as a translator and interpreter, cooking and cleaning to make ends meet, Marianciuc found ten minutes every day, either before or after work, to sit down with his paper and create. “The very first crane that I posted, even the photo is really bad. ... As I go through the days, you can see a gradual development,” he said. “Practice makes perfect, as they say.”
One hundred days passed in a wink, then 365. When January 2016 rolled around, he'd found such comfort in his craft that he couldn’t bear to stop.
The Full Experience
One of eleven siblings, Marianciuc says family is one of his biggest inspirations for creating his artworks. Taking in the natural surroundings of his rural hometown during morning walks is another.
A lover of classical and indie music since high school, Marianciuc is also inspired by sound. At some point in his journey he began adding song recommendations to his Instagram posts, explaining, “If [followers] look at the crane and listen to the song, they will get the full experience.”
Since 2020, Marianciuc has branched into another sensory medium: fragrance. Since his family could never afford perfumes, he enjoyed the natural scents of changing seasons. It wasn’t until a trip to France in 2020 for an exhibition that he discovered the perfume boutiques of Paris and he was smitten.
“I ended up buying some samples,” he said, adding that the day he returned home was when the pandemic hit. “I had to isolate in my room for two weeks. ... I started to unpack my luggage and I found the samples.” His sitting down and sampling these spawned the idea of incorporating scent into his work.
Today, Marianciuc’s creative process starts with experiencing fragrance and brainstorming colors and paper to suit a mood. He prefers to work in monochrome, venturing into warmer colors in winter. Working with clients, he begins each new proposal with a sketch.
Challenges
Marianciuc has collaborated with perfume brands that appreciate his work—sometimes in large-scale ad campaigns. But despite becoming a master of his craft, his cranes still bring challenges.These are “mainly mental,” he said. Not being in “the right mind space,” or “in a creative mood.” Or having “stuff in my head that I have to deal with,” or “if I’m stressed.” Meanwhile, parting with commissions can be hard.
His favorite piece is one of his latest works. More time-consuming to produce, this crane features a traditional Romanian motif and took one week to complete. Because of several mini accidents using his cutting tools in the beginning, Marianciuc now paces himself, taking regular breaks to rest his wrists, and works calmly and cautiously with his blades.
While translating the abstract into the tactile has been his aim, he draws inspiration from another source. The famous story of Japanese girl Sadako Sasaki made an impression on Marianciuc, as she was affected by atomic radiation after the bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
“In Japanese culture, if you fold 1,000 cranes you are granted good health or a wish,” Marianciuc said. “She folded 600, but then she passed away from leukemia.”
Dealing With the Darkness
“I got this email one day from a lady from the U.S.,” said Marianciuc. “Her husband was about to have quite a complicated surgery and she was stressing out, pacing around the hospital. She didn’t know what to do. Then she took out her phone [and] came across one of my posts.”Scrolling through all his cranes and reading everything, by the time she saw the last one, the surgery was almost over. “She said that she was really grateful and thankful, that somehow in a way I was able to distract her from the stress,” Marianciuc said. “I'll cherish that story for the rest of my life.”
Marianciuc is currently collaborating with UK-based musician Kinship to create a music video. The melody and uplifting lyrics are “closest to what I'd say is my ideal music style,” he said. “This whole project, what I do, comes from maybe a dark place, but I wanted to deal with that darkness in a really creative and positive way.”
