Commissioned for the Krebs Festival, by the University Of Sheffield
GFP Origami was an ART/Science commission for the Krebs Festival, University of Sheffield. Seiko collaborated with chemical biologist Dr. Nathan Adams to create this unique sculpture. To achieve this, Seiko used 10,047 pieces of square green fluorescent paper, while Robin Dobson, sculptor, helped them make the metal frame.
The green fluorescent protein (GFP) is what makes certain species of jellyfish appear to glow in the dark, displaying a bright green fluorescence when exposed to light.
'As for me science is something far removed from what I normally do.
When I began reading about the Krebs cycle and biochemistry, I started to see the word "folding" was used very frequently in the world to describe the behaviour of proteins, which stuck with me.
After several meetings and a lab visit at the university, I began to notice that their research involves so many repeated experiments, painstakingly retried and redesigned before success.
I wanted to represent those researchers everyday effort expressed in my work.
This is why I chose origami as a technique, and to build a sculpture from many repeated elements, as it neatly represents these two observations.
While we were looking at things to create, I was struck by the beautiful, unique structure of the GFP protein, as well as a challenging shape to make as a sculpture.'