Daniela Cilurzo

http://www.danielacilurzo.com

https://www.instagram.com/daniela_cilurzo/?hl=it

Born in Catanzaro, Daniela Cilurzo grew up in Brianza and later moved to the Oltrepò Pavese. Here she intensely cultivates her love for nature and animals. This new dimension allowed her to live in close contact with them and to get to meet Kalè, the donkey for which she became a farrier. Indomitably curious and always interested in the most varied artistic techniques, she begins collaborating with different artists and artisans, from design to production. In this way she learned and experimented, venturing with oil paintings, chalks, watercolors but also with wall decorations for interiors, artistic stained glass and inlays. She discovers origami at the age of sixteen. In the beginning, it was pure fun, abandoned and resumed several times. It later becomes an art to study and to develop. The experiments with origami, particularly with geometric tessellations, reveal a new field of research: dressmaking. She, therefore, begins to apply the same rules of origami to fabrics, trying to turn the wonderful geometric stiffness, that is typical of this technique, into something soft and wearable. To reach her goal, in 2017, she becomes a seamstress and she starts designing and sewing her first line of origami dresses. She is part of the organizing committee of the convention "Origami e Didattica" promoted annually by Centro Diffusione Origami.

Photo: Mattia Calvo for MACA Foto, Pavia

Blue skirt

Taffeta fabric

2016

After discovering the book “Shadowfolds” by Palmer and Rutzky and the masterpiece tessellations by Alessandro Beber I had the epiphany to try and tessellate a piece of purple cloth. It was meant to become a stole but it eventually resulted in a possible dress. Today’s origami tessellations originate from the creativity of Suzo Fujimoto, a Japanese chemistry teacher, of the 20th century. But what is tessellation? Tessellation – repeated patterns of specific shapes - is a peculiar section of origami. This special kind of motif is composed of geometric shapes placed together without leaving gaps. Tessellations are generally composed of straight polygons, although the shapes used can also have curved edges. The polygonal shapes are obtained from folded pleats and twists following a pre-creased pattern of lines. The more basic patterns are composed of triangles, squares and hexagons. The exceptionality of tessellations is that they are all made from a unique piece of material. The patterns used for the tessellations of my models use triangles, squares, hexagons or star-shaped pentagons or a combination of these.