Jiangmei Wu
I work in the overlapping space of art, design, mathematics,
technology, and engineering by exploring the conceptual grounds, the
geometric and tectonic forms, the mathematical understandings, and the
material applicability of origami and origami-inspired design. In
particular, I am interested in how to explore folding through spatial
art installations, how to invent new folding designs based on
mathematical understandings, how to digitally fabricate these new
designs and structures in various materials (not necessarily paper),
and most importantly, I am interested in exploring how these aspects
work together within the conceptual and physical spaces in which they
occur.
The fabric origami work is based on a technique the artist calls
“tessellation grafting.” To graft a tessellation, one starts by
cutting along all the edges figuratively, 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 back to
lines. Interestingly, the tessellation grafting is rooted in the
dual graph of a plane graph G in graph theory. While this work is
based on the duality of the Voronoi diagram and the Delaunay
triangulation, other dualities can be further explored.