wood – adam rowe

Listing band scale #5

the question

Is there a shape, which when repeated, can create a Mobius strip?

Yep, there is. Really all you have to do is chop up a strip into squares, however many pieces you want and there you go, done. That was easy. Maybe I’m not asking the right question.

the better question

Is there an asymmetrical shape which interlocks with itself to create a continuous band on a non-orientable surface?

That one is a lot better, but it seems a little unrealistic that I would have started out wondering that instead of the first question.

an answer

To create a simple shape that tiles rectilinearly, you can start with a square, and any change you make to one side, you make the opposite change to the other side. So, if you squish in from the right, you squish out from the left. Continue until you have something interesting.

Listing bands have the additional twist (pun intended) that at some point, the top of one tile (or “scale” which is what I’m calling the individual components) is eventually going to have to fit in with the reverse of the bottom of another. Only bands made up of odd numbers of scales will work. This is probably easiest to understand if you consider that just one scale, twisted into a band would have to fit into itself this way, and one is an odd number. Even numbers simply twist too many times for an asymmetrical scale.

This particular band is made up of nineteen scales, shown above. They were fabricated from .03″ mild steel and allowed to rust naturally. The scales were designed so that just the right amount of twist and bend could happen with this size and material.

The base was constructed from fir and walnut. Displaying a band this large was a challenge, since it sort of collapses if it’s set on the floor. The base allows easy viewing from multiple angles, which is really necessary to get an idea of how complex the shape is. Fortunately there’s a sweet spot that allows just the right distribution of weight so that it’s balanced and sturdy on the base.

I didn’t do a rough draught for this one, which isn’t my usual process, but everything went smoothly anyway.

interlocking panel box

Is there a shape (solid) which can be repeated 6 times and interlocks to form a hexahedron? I’m still not entirely sure. This may even have search results, but I never looked it up. I wanted to figure it out for myself.

I mean, I still haven’t figured it out, but I got kind of close.

March 24, 2014

sphere of fifths

The circle of fifths is a music theory model several hundred years old which describes the relationships between diatonic scales. It can be seen as an illustration of infinite chord progressions. Sphere of Fifths uses the idea of infinite knots to represent musical cycles, and uses pentagonal knot designs of varying complexity to bring the music theory model into 3 dimensions. When the light source is changed to different angles, shadows from the opaque parts of the glass recombine in complex shadows; the viewer of the piece gets to decide on some of its content by taking this into consideration.

The piece appears to be held together tenuously, the same way a motive in a good piece of music will hold everything together without having to overshadowing things. The wood and strings are reminiscent of orchestra instruments. The knots themselves are similarly suggestive, and not directly representative of a circle of fifths diagram.

the rough draught with a thumbs up from the artist

This piece was donated to the KJDS‘s 2014 fundraising event, Some Enchanted Evening.

proof

background

Students who graduated around the millennium from Carson-Newman College [sic] were invited to submit recent works for a show to coincide with the university’s 2013 homecoming. The purpose of writing so much about this piece is mainly to explain my artwork to the other people in the show, since it was done partly for them.
A geode is a regular-ol’ looking rock that, when cracked open, reveals a secret world of gemstone. If someone handed you a geode, you would have to take it on faith that in the center were amethysts. It would not be until you destroyed the rock-ness (the smooth, round, appearance of something that looks uniformly rocky ) of the geode that you discovered its real nature.
Years after my senior show in 1999, I decided that 1) instead of trying to maintain the pristine nature of several of the pieces and 2) as a way of ‘moving on’ since they physically took up a lot of room and actually got in the way of working on other stuff, I would burn them and save the cremains for a future project.
The development of my optophonetic alphabet has been an ongoing project since high school, and as such has become a part of my artwork. It, along with keeping a journal, was something I was always working on through college.

process

The cremains were the material I had first, so they were good to go.

I had the general idea for the form in my head, but I couldn’t work out if it were possible to really exist when I sat down to measure materials. I tried sketching out the form, but I wanted to be sure it would really occupy the space I wanted it to. So, I used SketchUp to create a model on the computer. As I was creating this model, I decided that 21 inches in any direction was a good size; each cube would be a 1-inch cube, for a total of 2321 cubes.

In order to use wood for the basic structure, I had to plane down 2 by 12s to get precise 1-inch pieces of wood to work with. Thanks to my dad for this, because he suffered through running boards through the planer for 2 days with me. After that, I built the structure according to the model.

With the cubes stacked the way they are, only 1326 faces of these cubes are visible to the outside. I used this number as the number of characters I would use for the written message which would appear on the cubes. The form as a whole is based around a cube itself, and so characters on the faces could be read from six different ways. To easily type my message, I needed a font, which I created using FontForge.

I also needed a 2-d way of plotting where the characters would go in 3 dimensions, for which I used Excel (which I like to refer to as Microsoft Grid, since that is often how it it used). After writing a message, I created .DXF files

using Inkscape for use with my [amazon_link id=”B008KPBFSI” target=”_blank” locale=”US” container=”” container_class=”” ]Silhouette Cameo[/amazon_link] paper cutter. As the letters were cut out, I glued them in the right place on the structure and painted it with several coats of primer.

meaning

The message written all over this piece is the plain meaning. I wrote about being in school with the other people in the show, about how lucky I was to be around them, and the sense of healthy competition which pushed us all to take things to the next level.

One thing I still like imagining is the pieces in the gallery at night, with no one there, but the presence of the artworks being there, sort of representing each of us. For me, the whole show was about creating a monument to our time at school together.