Designer/director JM Blay in Valencia, Spain: “On the occasion of the Imadate Art Fair in the prefecture of Echizen in Japan, I was invited to create an audiovisual piece for an art exhibition for the Echizen Museum.

“The exhibition was about Japanese handmade paper as always, but this year was the first time they were inviting artists from different artistic disciplines to show their view of Washi using their own visual narratives.

“I approached this as an experimental project, finding a narrative in the journey that is the process of Washi paper-making.

“The way of making this paper is like a ceremony, almost spiritual, and more related to the gods than humans. This vision led to the creation of an oneiric piece about the making of Washi.

“Flying branches interacting with each other, a drop of water starting the process, boiling strips of bark, an emerging sheet of paper from the water… This is the narrative, almost like small interlocked stories about the materials that give them their importance.

“Washi is a solo project that I spent almost a year on (in between projects) using Cinema 4D and After Effects with plugins X-Particles and Red Giant, everything was rendered with Redshift.”
 

 
Client: Echizen Museum

Production: Blay Studio
Director/animator: JM Blay