One day, I began to wonder what 1,000 origami swans would look like. After folding them all, satisfied with the answer, I wondered instead how many it would take to fill the shoebox, then, the bin. As the number of swans grew, so did my desire to share what I had done with others. However, a pile of paper things was hardly a worthy display. I thought to model a sculpture after myself and cover it in the swans. The skeleton of the body was made from wooden dowels and posterboard. Using old books, I tore out and crumpled up pages to tape around the skeleton to build out the mass. The body was then wrapped in long strips of paper tape to provide a skin, and the swans were then hot glued, one-by-one, onto the surface of the sculpture. The sculpture took about 200 hours to make, from July 2023 to April 2024. Give or take a few, the final swan count was 17,496. The change from regular squares of paper into a natural form is, in my appraisal, a miracle of art and a transfiguration into beauty.