HIROKO Momoi

The Artist

Named HIROKO, Hiroko Momoi was born in 1979, is a pop-up artist in Japan.
I make pop-ups aiming not only to surprise when a pop-up is opened up but also to represent a “space of healing” and an “atmosphere of peace” by the light and shade produced by its “delicate” sculpture. And I hope that they will make someone feel peaceful.

In the first place, why I stick to the “pop-up” is based on my childhood experience that I was struck home to my heart by the scene that my crafts growing bulk as I made were thrown into the trash. Owing to that the artwork itself “should be stored into a limited space”. Although, every time I make pop-ups, I attracted its mechanism, movement, form, and so on. Then now I found the characteristic beauty in them. I adjust pop-up to things which move people’s emotions in our daily life and close in the works.

I like to use various white papers, each of them have different textures and tints, on my pop-up works. Because white papers give more aspects to works, such as transmission and reflection of light, and shadow projection, than their forms. Sometimes, they create more colors than colored works depending on the situation, I think.
Making pop-ups is not improvised or spontaneous for me but to design carefully calculated. When I build a structure of pop-up, its form, its details, its kinds of paper, its shading when the light fell on it, the reflecting of light and so on, I replay them in my head. Then, I draw the design. Therefore, I could make more delicate and stand-alone full 3D pop-up sculptures even if without their base-cards. So, my works might be similar to “architecture” rather than “art”.