Jiangmei WU

Assistant Professor
Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana, USA

I am fascinated by folding as a tactile process of working with the material—for instance, paper, or other rigid sheet materials. I am drawn to these naturally occurring folds and working on understanding how they can be analyzed in order to understand the material tectonics.

Punica
Punica
57 x 57 x 57 cm
Hi-tec Kozo, LEDs
2019

Punica is the Latin name for pomegranate. I named the work Punica as it reminded me of the silhouette of the pomegranate flowers that I saw while growing up in Southeast China. Punica is folded based on flat-foldable Miura-ori tessellation with divots. In general, to fold Miura-ori into smooth curvature is materially impossible. In order to generate folded surfaces with smooth and gentle curves, Miura-ori is altered by adding divots. In Punica, an approximation of the target profile of a smooth sine curve is generated first. And this profile curve is then arrayed and stretched into a rotational double-curved surface with both a positive Gaussian curvature value and a negative Gaussian curvature value.