Stacy Speyer
My creative passions shift between a hunger for knowledge and a constant drive to make. I am drawn to vibrant colors and a range of different mediums. I tend to begin a project with simple parts and combine them in a complex arrangement. My light airy structures use a minimal amount of material to express a woven plane in space or a regular geometric configuration on a sphere. I seek a balance of movement and stillness, between the expansion of infinity and the quiet emptiness of the void. Every piece exists as both a whole unit and a multiplicity of smaller elements interlaced in an emergent phenomena.
Wooden beads are made into 32 pentagons: 8 in the inner ring and 24 in the outer ring. Four pentagons meet at every vertex creating the folds in this {5, 4} hyperbolic surface. The undulating surface shares an organic beauty with the variations of color in the wooden beads. While the copper wire's ability to hold the beads in this irregular space adds a sense of motion to the piece. The visual simplicity of the 8 pentagons in the inner ring contrasts with the density of the outer ring, which has 3 times as many pentagons.
Just as two tetrahedra fit perfectly together, two truncated tetrahedra can combine to make one compound shape. The hexagon of one truncated tetrahedron perfectly frames the triangle of the other. The front and back edges of the polyhedra match up in a beautiful echoing of lines. The 4 pictures shown emphasize the dramatic change that occurs from different views points: 3-fold, 2-fold, 4-fold, and close-up.