Via Starwars.com:
THE ARTIST DISCUSSES USING HIS STUNNING PAPER ART TO CELEBRATE THE SAGA.
One of Star Wars‘ greatest legacies is how it has inspired fan creativity and expression. There are fan films, paintings, and action-figure photography. Homemade costumes and comics. In other words, we feel such a connection to these characters and their stories that we use our own gifts to present Star Wars back to the world in a new way. It’s really a beautiful thing, and Marc Hagan-Guirey‘s truly amazing Star Wars kirigami — celebrations of the saga’s designs and iconic moments, made by folding and cutting paper to create 3D artwork — does this legacy proud. StarWars.com spoke with Hagan-Guirey to find out how he learned the form, his process for making Star Wars kirigami, and much more.
StarWars.com: So how did you get started making kirigami?
Marc Hagan-Guirey: It’s a bunch of different circumstances, I guess, that led naturally to the inception of that kind of career path. I’m a digital art director, and at the time I’d been working in the advertising industry for about seven years. And I think it’s a lot of that seven-year itch, so there’s that scenario where I was getting more and more disillusioned with churning out ad campaigns, and in my head I was thinking that I kinda wanted to take a break from doing that kind of thing. And one thing I’d always missed was actually doing things with my hands. As a kid, I’d always made stuff, and when I think back… You know, we didn’t have a ton of money when we were growing up. Although my mom was able to get a hold of the action figures for me, building the actual fortresses, the fortresses themselves were things I built. So my currency as a kid was toilet roll tubes, egg cartons, cereal boxes, basically. We would trade those.
So what had happened was, I had been over to L.A., actually, for the holiday with my ex-partner, and I’m a big [Frank Lloyd] Wright fan. I’m sure you know he’s a famous American architect, and I’m particularly a massive fan of a collection of houses that he did called Mayan Revival textile block houses. At the time, one of those, [the Ennis House], was on the market in L.A. A friend who I was staying with knew I loved this house, and knew that it was for sale. And it was being sold by Christie’s, you know, that really famous auctioneer. So, basically, we concocted a ruse to go in and pretend to be prospective buyers. And of course, this house was on sale for… I think it was $17 million dollars. So we ended up going down and having a look around. For me it was the closest thing to a spiritual experience I’ve ever had in my life, walking around this house. But at the same time, I was having to go, “What’s the plumbing like? What state is the electricity in?” And at the same time I’m going, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” [Laughs] But that house itself is really famous, and you don’t know it but you will have seen it in lots of movies. It’s most famous for Blade Runner.
And so, Deckard’s apartment [in Blade Runner], when his car drives up, it’s raining and you see the car pulls up and then turn into the gates into his apartment, that’s the exterior of the Ennis House.
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