4Love, changing the purpose of the ninja star

4Love, changing the purpose of the ninja star

I have been folding origami from when I was a child.

My mum taught me. 

It’s something that would always relax me.

During my life it was something that I was doing just to occupy my hands and to destress, like a mindful activity.

In the last few years, from around 2017, I started to make a lot of the same, modules of origami, and glue them to canvases.

For example I used 81 modules, 81 single ninja stars, to make “Portal”; with the ninja stars forming squares in the middle of the patterns.

I use the origami ninja star a lot.

The ninja star is originally the throwing knife used by ninja assassins to kill people, to hurt: it’s a weapon.

But I really love the shape of the origami version of it, and how I can make interesting forms and patterns by repeating and aligning many of them.

And for me the ninja star is “4Love”. 

I call it “4Love”. 

It’s connected with the number 4.

For example as a necklace, we wear it on the 4th energy center, where the heart is, and it has 4 chambers like the heart, and 4 points, so the number 4 is repeated.

And I like to have a different message to it: for love (4Love) instead of for war, for fight. 

I find very interesting the way it’s built (you can see me folding it here): it’s formed of 2 parts, and actually the majority of origami are formed only of one piece of paper, but this one is a module formed of 2, and it kind of looks like a hug: you have two people with arms, and the way they stick together, there is a pocket and a part that goes inside the pocket. 

So they are really tucked together in a very solid way, and that’s one of the principles of origami: that no glue is used to assemble this, and it really works for a ninja star.

Two pieces together as one.

 

Una Marzorati

unamarz Creations

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