Unknown

Artist: Aeron Gurskis
Writer: Nathan Turnbeaugh
Editor: Michelle Lo

Aeron Gurskis, a sophomore, has been folding modular origami pieces since the pandemic when he made his first kusudama ball out of sheer boredom. Soon he was hooked, and he began to delve deeper into the world of Japanese origami. Gurskis began to experiment with his own designs to understand how the individual pieces of each kusudama ball came together. Eventually, he could create his first thirty-piece ball without any outside instruction. Inspired by Pinterest, Gurskis made this variation of a kusudama ball with added flowers as accents. The twelve individual flowers took him ten minutes each, while the ball itself took an insurmountable four hours to complete, factoring in the time for assembly, the completed piece took eight hours to reach the state we see now. As for the materials, Gurskis is incredibly resourceful, using Post-It notes to assemble the flowers and utilizing the adhesive portion to better hold together the ball. In total, he used ninety pieces of paper, the flowers using sixty, and the ball itself taking up thirty. Gurskis says the piece itself isn’t attempting to provoke any particular response or convey a message, rather, it served more as an experiment to test his own creativity.