mostly art and music
The design is an experiment in using spirals in combination with radial symmetry to produce a unicursal knot. Usually I base knot designs like this off of circles and polygons, so this was a new challenge. I originally used this design for some cut paper stationery, shown here. Wanting to take things up a notch, …
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 …
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 …
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.
This piece was donated to the KJDS‘s 2014 fundraising event, Some Enchanted Evening.
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 …