Yuken Teruya
“This project challenged me to create the image of a forest out of a paper product. The idea behind this project was inspired by Aristotle’s philosophy of nature, which states that “Everything in nature has its end and function and nothing is without purpose.” An example of this can be seen when a leaf emerges on a plant and the stem twists, thereby allowing sunlight to reach it. This adaptation allows us to see the functional aspect of plants in nature. Aristotle also claimed that the development from potentiality to actuality is one of the most important things to learn from nature. An acorn, for example, carries within it the potential to become an oak tree, and a full-grown tree is an actualized form of this potential. I started working from this idea, and it occurred to me that a paper product still retains a trace of what it used to be when it was part of the tree and the forest.”