Carlo Séquin
My 2014 submissions complement my oral Bridges presentation: "LEGO-Knots," describing a modular building-block system for prismatic tubular sculptures. These shapes were inspired by the "Borsalino" sculpture exhibited by Henk van Putten in 2013. It had a very modular geometry, making use of just two simple, swept geometrical shapes to compose the sculpture. The art objects that I have selected show three different ways in which this modular concept can be extended: I first modify the sweep path while maintaining the 3-fold symmetry; then I change the cross section to a triangle and introduce 4-fold symmetry; and finally I extend the LEGO-Knot part family to be able to make relatively free-form constructivist sculptures.
This sculpture maintains the basic geometry and 3-fold symmetry of van Putten's "Borsalino." However, in the middle of the three pairs of curved connector pieces, linking subsequent end-caps, a straight extender piece has been inserted. It is just long enough to push the end cross sections past one another, so that they come into a diagonal corner-to-corner alignment. Such a pair of end cross sections is then capped off with a new end-cap which is produced by a rotational sweep of a square around its corner, parallel to a face diagonal. This can be seen as an end-cap with a "rhombic" cross section, and the resulting sculpture now gives the impression that the square cross section is being swept while standing on one of its corners.
Four triangular prisms can be made to pass with one of their edges through a common point (at the center of gravity of the resulting sculpture) so that every prism has two faces that are co-planar with a face of one of its two neighbors. This compact arrangement of four beams has overall 4-fold (D4) symmetry. This symmetry is maintained when the eight prism ends are capped off with four suitable helical end-caps in the shape of a bow-tie. The resulting sculpture is reminiscent again of the Borsalino shape introduced by Henk van Putten.
The fabrication of several new modular parts to extend Henk van Putten's Borsalino shape in different ways has yielded a rich assortment of tubular snap-together parts with square cross sections based on the LEGO-Duplo module. Inspired by work by Bruce Beasley, Paul Bloch, and Jon Krawczyk, these parts have been used to make constructivist sculptures of a more free-form style. "Pas de Deux" is a sculpture resulting from two intertwined sweeps along a space curve composed of several pieces of circular and helical arcs. The resulting 12-inch tall sculpture is presented in two photographs taken from different angles.