GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — “It is 144,114 paper-quilled hearts. It took me about seven months to make,” says artist, Christina Hindley.
It’s an obscure craft Hindley just learned around Christmas — knowing she wanted to create a piece to break a world record.
“Paper Quilling is taking strips of paper and inserting them into a special tool with a notch on the top and then you spin it, and then you can just create a shape with it, ” Hindley explains.
She contacted Guinness World Records and didn’t hear back for three months.
When they got back to her there was no current record, so they set a goal number together; 14,000 paper-quilled hearts. Guinness then asked she collect evidence of her efforts.
“It’s just how many can you create, and then it has to be on display for five minutes, a minimum of five minutes you have to display it somewhere,” She said.
Hindley is no stranger to taking on a challenge, and decided this year's ArtPrize would be the perfect event for her attempt.
“We’ve been to ArtPrize many, many years, not every year, but pretty much, pretty much every year, I have always wanted to be a part of it,” Hindley told us. “And that's literally all I'm wanting to get out of this is just to be a part of it.”
She estimates her piece— called For the Love of Hope and Harmony— took her around 166,000 hours total.
“I created it to hopefully look like a sunset because a sunset is something that people can see all around the world, anywhere you are.” Hindley called her piece a unifier. Telling us the different colors represent people of different backgrounds, desires, and abilities— complementing and contrasting with each other, but coming together to create something beautiful.
“I am hoping to just let people know that we are a lot more similar than we are different when we have so much division right now in our world.”
If you’d like to see Hindley’s artwork, it will be hanging in Park Congregational Church alongside 70 other artists. You can find it using the ArtPrize map we have in our Guide to Everything ArtPrize.
