Claudia Furthner
Starting with beadwork and especially Contemporary Geometric Beadwork (CGB) three years ago gave me the long desired possibility to unite my interests in Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Philosophy and Arts.
In collaboration with Kate McKinnon and the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork team, I've been exploring warped and cycling forms and spaces in my sewn beadwork.
Spiral lines (like Slinky toys) have been of particular interest to our team, and when we discovered a way of casting an energetic loop of beads that would maintain both this classic curvature and twist with structural integrity, we began to build on it geometrically.
Each of my submissions reflects this exploration.
This is a dimensional, sea-shell-like model of our essential 2/1 spiral line, generated from placing a three-round increase progression into an otherwise straight and flat fabric of peyote stitch.
Without the directional change to build the gold section, this would have been a flat spiral stack that only increased in circumference. The gold beads begin in the round in which I stopped applying the increase progression and began placing only one bead per round as per normal peyote stitch.
This spiral is a sculptural model of the same increase progression that our team developed to build the energetic loops used in our Geometric Capture series - this base spiral could have just as easily been finished as a tumble of orderly polygons.
The Space Station Bangle was our team's first in the Geometric Capture series. I built it from a series of 6 connected, twisting loops (shown in orange and blue), each of which has had its space captured and defined geometrically by the insertion of two pre-made pentagonal elements (shown in black with yellow flowers).
Each pentagon-capped barbell is hinged to a neighbor at a slight twist, so the bangle cycles in both directions quite naturally and easily assumes a variety of arrangements.
Our team quickly discovered that we could capture any line or loop this way (and with many different -gons) and a new type of architecture sprang into our minds. We now have collaborators in this work from materials science to space structures.