British sculptural artist Zoe Bradley found inspiration in an origami flower that caught her eye at a flea market, and now she's making them by the thousands.
The late fashion designer Alexander McQueen spotted her penchant for theatricality and quickly put her to work on his catwalk creations. Using the unconventional fashion medium of paper, she went on to create signature works for Michiko Koshino and IDN, and window displays for Tiffany, Missoni, Donna Karan and Lane Crawford.
In town recently to create a dress from 3,000 red paper roses for a display at a mall in Sha Tin, Bradley quickly went to work; she had less than three days to complete the dress, which was fitted on to a 3.5-metre mannequin. The structure had to be moved onto a dais before Bradley and her team could cover the mannequin's petticoat, an enormous metal cage, with the origami roses.
'Making a rose can take from 30 seconds to five minutes,' Bradley says. 'But when you're dealing with 3,000 of those, you're dealing with quite a lot of man hours. The work is going to be day and night.'
The paper dress installation was commissioned by New Town Plaza as a tribute to the late Princess Diana. The thousands of red roses are emblematic to the work's theme: love. 'The English rose is iconic, and kind of fitting, too,' Bradley says. 'It needs to be quite an English statement.'
She reaches over to the table beside her and from a stack of metallic red paper selects one thin strip. 'I came across the idea when I found one of these [origami roses] in a flea market. So I took it apart, sat down with it, tried to work it out and tried to get my own take on it. Then suddenly, I'm making thousands of them in lots of different sizes.