Interactive kirigami exhibit brings coral reefs and Pacific fish to OKC

By Christian Thorsberg

Artists Malcolm Zachariah and Emma Difani hope the installation will raise the public’s awareness of coral bleaching, a symptom of warming oceans brought on by climate change.

“Seed Reef,” an exhibit by Malcolm Zachariah and Emma Difani, at Factory Obscura OKC. (Christian Thorsberg/MEDILL)

by Christian Thorsberg

OKLAHOMA CITY—In the azure fluorescence of Factory Obscura—a local collective that displays immersive art installations—techno instrumentals throb and streamers reflect pink and green lights, rippling a wall-to-wall glow. Within the ubiquitous blue, a walkable coral reef—one life-size still life—invites guests into a susurrating atmosphere of color, conservation, and kirigami—the practice of cutting and folding paper into larger creations. Origami, but with scissors.

Co-creator Malcolm Zachariah leads his way through the exhibit, titled Seed Reef, stopping occasionally to adjust one of the hundreds of paper fish dangling from opaque wires affixed to the ceiling. Beside his path, on low-rise tables, hundreds more paper coral reefs and bottom-dwelling creatures interact. Crabs, eels, stingrays, jellyfish, many types of fish—everything in the space is a kirigami creation.

Hundreds of fish, including Blue Hippo Tang, dangle from the ceiling inside Seed Reef. (Christian Thorsberg/MEDILL)

The deep-sea immersion is spectacular, and next door to Seed Reef, in a makeshift classroom, a process all the more vibrant is being modeled. Following instructions from Zachariah, visitors are busy making their own coral kirigami. When finished, these pieces are added to the designated, blank-white coral forests within the exhibit. That visitor-made coral pop with color is representative of coral restoration, Zachariah says, an effort that needs dire support—since 1950, half of earth’s coral reefs have died.

“There's a lot of problems with coral bleaching and climate change,” says Oklahoma City-based artist Zachariah, picking up a paper coral. “So what we have are these little white corals representing bleached coral skeletons. We proposed to have people make their own in color, and then we’re adding them to the exhibit to represent their vitality.”

A visitor-made coral amidst the sea of bleached corals. (Christian Thorsberg/MEDILL)

With this level of interaction, Zachariah is pleased to educate visitors about climate change, while also teaching bits of the kirigami practice and Oklahoma’s own state history.

“Why should this be in Oklahoma?” he asks, gesturing to Seed Reef. “Well, why not? We have an Oklahoma aquarium, and there’s also fossilized corals in the area, because the state used to be under the sea. So, we're inviting all these people to be very creative, which I'm excited about.”

Zachariah pauses to look at a table of young children coloring a coral. “I didn't really know anyone else doing this art style as a little kid.”

For Zachariah, who is also a biochemist, Seed Reef is the coming together of many lifelong interests. In first grade he received a book of origami safari animals, and went on to practice kirigami, creating the herds of mammals and dinosaurs that fascinated him in nature documentaries. In middle school, he explored his early passion for chemistry by keeping saltwater aquariums filled with real-life coral, clownfish, and royal gramma. Many of the fish in Seed Reef, Zachariah says, he had once cared for in his childhood tanks.

In 2011, after graduating with a degree in biochemistry from the University of Oklahoma, Zachariah studied marine drug discovery in graduate school at the University of Utah before deciding that a life of research wasn’t for him. Instead, he returned home to Oklahoma and spent a year furthering his kirigami practice, dedicating himself, for the first time, to a craft that had thus far only been a hobby and schoolwork reprieve.

Suddenly, Zachariah detours from Seed Reef’s path, pulling back a black sheet that blends into the wall. He steps inside the dark cylinder, meant to mimic the deep sea, and points to the fluorescing firefly squid and jellyfish that hang suspended in the pitch-black scene. “As a chemist, I know the properties of these paper materials, and they’re kind of the same properties that reef creatures use,” he says. “For natural coral and a lot of fish, these fluorescent pigments are actually a kind of sunscreen for them to withstand the UV light of the sun.”

Firefly squid and jellyfish hang inside Seed Reef’s deep sea installation. (Christian Thorsberg/MEDILL)

In the early stages of his kirigami journey, color was actually Zachariah’s biggest limitation. Also, a water colorist and ceramic sculptor, he noted an incongruence between medium and color. Initially, his final kirigami designs could only be one solid hue—whatever color the paper was. His animals, too intricate and small to paint after they’d been cut and folded, lacked patterns, pop, and realism. He had to figure out a way to color the two-dimensional papers beforehand so that after being folded, cut, and arranged dozens of times, the final three-dimensional kirigami would perfectly reflect accurate colors and features.

For this, Zachariah turned to Emma Difani, a visual artist based in Oklahoma City who teaches printmaking at Oklahoma City University and Artspace at Untitled, a community art space. They had met at a few local artist gatherings  and trade shows.

Difani screen prints each kirigami by hand in her Oklahoma City studio. She works color by color, letting the paper dry completely before screen printing the next. Once finished, Zachariah cuts each kirigami with a three-dimensional cutting machine, and folds the piece to completion. “So, in total work time, each fish can take 30 minutes to an hour,” Zachariah says.

The one exception is the room’s largest attraction: the eight foot-long papier-mâché whale shark, which Difani made when she saw how large the space was. “We needed something big,” Zachariah says with a smile, gesturing to the shark. “This was where folding papers wasn’t enough.”

One pink fish amidst a school of reef-dwellers. (Christian Thorsberg/MEDILL)

Seed Reef is Difani and Zachiariah’s third project together. The first two also explored fragile ecosystems and plant-animal relationships. In 2019, “Cuesta Cortada”, Spanish for “Hill Cut,” featured kirigami yucca plants, white sand dunes, and cacti—an homage to Difani’s home state of New Mexico and their collective love of plants. In 2020, the pair made “Waystation,” featuring Monarch butterflies and milkweed plants, a symbiosis that is endangered in Oklahoma.

“This has been really stretching my brain in terms of thinking of all these designs, but it's a nice challenge,” Zachariah says. “We work well together, because we know our styles and practices very well.”

It’s been a fun part of the last few years, Zachariah says, to see how each design can inspire the next. He picks up a kirigami brain coral and peers inside its hollow, tubular skeleton. “This design is basically just a barrel cactus,” he says. Then he walks over to his favorite piece in Seed Reef: the lionfish, its three colors and dozens of spines making it the most time-consuming fish to make. It was also the first: Zachariah was inspired by the stripes of an orchid petal he had referenced for an earlier kirigami plant.

Zachariah’s day job is as an environmental programs specialist at the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, where he plans public outreach programs and air quality rules. He’s able to transfer what he’s learned from this sector, into his designs and environmental focus with Seed Reef and other kirigami exhibitions.

“People think of themselves as separate from the natural world,” Zachariah says. “In my job, we're working for public health, and to help everyone have cleaner air. An added benefit for reduced emissions is safer environments. You can’t stop air at a border, so the environment is everyone’s responsibility and has an impact on everyone.”