Jiangmei Wu
I am intrigued by these naturally occurring folds and how they can be
analyzed in order to understand nature. Unfolding a folded design
reveals a patterned map of creating and generating. And this map, also
called a ‘crease pattern,’ is often the result of counterintuitive
deliberation and calculation based on mathematical understanding.
While it is difficult to describe the folded form through the visual
characteristics of the folds on this map, it is more difficult to
reverse engineer and come up with logical patterns of folds that can
then be folded into desirable forms. I often employ mathematical
understanding and computational algorithms in generating a map of
folds.
To graft a tessellation, one starts by cutting along all edges
figuratively and then creating a new tessellation by inserting
rectangles, again, figuratively, along all the edges and polygons
connecting the vertices. To make the fabric origami, the corners
of new polygons are sewn together, collapsing the polygons back to
points and rectangles to back to lines. The two works shown as a
group here are produced based on a pattern that is created using
the tessellation grafting technique described above. One is based
on grafting heptagonal and hexagonal tiles in the hyperbolic plane
that is mapped into the Euclidean plane using a Poincaré disk. The
other one is based on grafting aperiodic pentagonal tiles in a
plane.