Sadako Sasaki – Anti-Nuclear Weapons Poster

Paper cut on A1 catridge Paper

Although usually I prefer to let my artwork speak for itself, this piece is one that has a very important meaning and story behind it.

When I was living in Japan I visited the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb museum, and inside they have hundreds of sad stories and pieces of tragedy exhibited (as you’d expect). But right at the end, they have this one piece about this girl–Sadako Sasaki–who, because of the nuclear bomb’s radiation, had cancer. And she adamantly believed in a Japanese superstition that if you make 1000 origami cranes, you get one wish granted.

So she sat there in hospital, and made these 1000 tiny (fingernail size) paper cranes.

And then died soon after.

They have all the cranes on display there and they tell her story, and it’s the one thing in that place that really hit me. So I really wanted to reign in on that mixture of child innocence and the bleak reality of nuclear warfare.

I crafted the negative space between the girls to be in the shape of bombs to further emphasize the nuclear weapon aspect of this, whilst using the school girl friendship paperchain to highlight the horror that these kinds of weapons have one innocent people.