With precise symmetry and smooth curved lines, I'd like to
make one thing perfectly clear was designed to be both crystalline and
organic. The thirty twisted components correspond to the thirty edges of the
icosahedron,a Platonic polyhedron with twenty triangular faces.
On an abstract level, this sculpture explores the idea of self-distortion.
Looking through any plastic piece to the opposite side, the views of the
sculpture
seen through itself are distorted by refraction. A pure mathematical
form corrupts itself.
Thirty identical pieces of heat-formed acrylic plastic were cemented
together to form this transparent orb. After cutting, each piece was first
cooked in an oven to soften the plastic, placed in a form to set the appropriate
shape, and then allowed to cool. The edges were then beveled to fit
together in groups of five. Finally, with jigging to hold the components in
the proper relative positions, they were cemented together. As in most of
my pieces, the time and effort that went into designing and making the jigs
far exceeds the actual construction of the sculpture itself. The crucial
dimension here is that the angle between the two straight edges of each component
must very accurately be the central angle between adjacent vertices of an
icosahedron, namely twice the arc cotangent of (1+sqrt[5])/ 2.
The chair is not part of it, just a handy plinth.
