Yoshiaki Araki
Artists
Statement
Tessellation is one of the best ways to illustrate mathematical natures of the shapes/spaces by repeating the congruent figures along them. I have been pursuing tessellation design of shapes/spaces to attract wide range of audiences with recognizable figures familiar to them such as animals. My recent interest is to apply tessellation design to newly discovered shapes/spaces because they are hardly incomprehensible to audiences outside the speciality in most cases.
Artworks
The Fivefold Way, A Convexly Curling Dog
40 x 40 x 40 cm
Card board
2014
Five convex polyhedra can be folded from an identical net consisting of ten regular triangles by properly gluing its edges on boundary with each other and creasing along the edges of triangles inside the net. To effectively demonstrate such a wonderful mathematical idea to non-specialists, the surface of the net is drawn as a single dog figure. Folding the net to convex polyhedra without any gaps or overlaps can be interpreted as a dog curled up in a ball. You can easily build up one of rigid convex polyhedra by simply inserting six margins into slits on the faces, however, you may be puzzled by the fact that other four different ways exist.