‘Oritsunagumono’ (which translates as ‘things folded and connected’) is an origami collection by artist, Takayuki Hori, designed to highlight the environmental threat of pollution to species native to Japan’s coastal waterways.

Each translucent sheet is first printed with either the images of fragments of an animal’s skeleton, or, on some pages, human-made discarded objects that are often ingested by the animals in the wild. Using the ancient tradition of folded paper, hori assembles the pages into a three-dimensional model. Once the paper is folded, the printed components are united as a whole, telling the visual story of the animal’s plight to survive in an increasingly polluted and hazardous ecosystem.

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