Blog - Camille Nathania: We Heart One Way | Surfers Paradise Festival.

Over the past month, the We Heart Collective have been working on the ultimate design challenge: create a physical piece of art for a one-day exhibit at the Surfers Paradise Festival. After what has been quite a gruelling few weeks for all of us, with some having to create pieces within only a few days after having returned from overseas trips, we were finally able to show off our work on Saturday for the One Way Street Party.

You can read more about our large scale letter project below, or you can skip the words and get on with the pretty pictures. Unfortunately I wasn't able to stay for very long, so I don't have any photos of the entire wall when it was finished, but I'm sure you'll get the idea.

The Concept:

After only having reached a solid consensus on our idea two weeks before the day, we scrambled to find our own individual concepts that would be easy to complete within such a short time frame.

Needless to say, creating a 1.2m high piece of work was going to be difficult to begin with, let alone then having to ensure that the concept was visually striking, would be suitable to the brief we came up with, and would also survive any potentially hazardous weather (lucky, the typically terrible June/July held off for the day and we had blue, blue skies all weekend).

We wanted something that would not only encapsulate us as a collective, giving each of us an opportunity to showcase our individual talents whilst still being able to contribute to a unified concept. I don't typically work in physical mediums, and being quite clumsy by default, I was definitely apprehensive about the project from the start—after thinking of about a dozen different crap ideas before finally being able to settle on one that ticked all the right boxes, I set about creating my 1.2m high, dark blue "N", the surface of which would be decorated in a variety of differently patterned origami triangles.

Even after spending countless hours folding luxurious ($3.25 a sheet) origami paper, measuring paper, cutting foamcore, and all the other background work behind this "N", when it came to the night before, this project was still taking me by surprise. Friday night was only meant to be 'glueing night', and yet somehow my mother and I ended up taking a whole three hours to arrange all the origami to ensure that the patterns flowed, and made some sort of visual sense.

We wanted something that would not only encapsulate us as a collective, giving each of us an opportunity to showcase our individual talents whilst still being able to contribute to a unified concept.

To say that this exhibition was our most challenging would be quite apt, as never before have we had so many different factors to consider. I'm unsure I'd jump at my next chance to create a piece almost as tall as my 1.55m self, I definitely welcome the opportunity to experiment with new mediums and grow from a creative perspective.

Thank You Very Much:

I definitely wouldn't have been able to do this without the extremely patient assistance of my mother, the ladies of the collective, and my other half Martin, who was the one that drove us both all the way to the city on two separate occasions to purchase this damned expensive origami paper. Thank you!