Janna Lumiruusu
Crochet is a technique and a technology to make tangible algorithmic bodies of geometries. This work is through a body-material interaction of crocheting various yarns into surface structures, or algorithmic bodies.
“This allows the designer to pay attention to the specificity of each particle/component individually, yet produce a complex overall structure.” - Gisela Baurmann and Daina Taimina, Crocheting Algorithms, 2012
The process of making surface structures by crocheting with yarn requires body knowledge. Through iterative algorithms, the body responds in dialogue to the flexible, soft and colourful properties of yarn and textile. These soma sensory experiences of tensions, rhythms and patterns generate algorithmic bodies.
Algorithmic surface structures express the incremental, and sometimes incomplete, process of crochet. This procedural work applies various yarns, and some acrylic paint, to grow spheres, hyperbolic planes and hexagonal tessellations. Each demonstrate properties of surface area and structure: spheres have minimum surface area to maximum volume; hyperbolic planes have maximum surface area to minimum volume; while hexagons make regular tessellations which are flat, thus no curvature, unless it lays upon an unflat form. The tessellating regular hexagon also has maximum area with minimum perimeter—much like bubbles packed together. Cell-by-cell, or here, stitch-by-stitch, we appreciate the incremental and entwined process of growth and becoming.