James Mallos
Artists
James Mallos
Sculptor
Washington, District of Columbia, USA
Statement
I am interested in weaving and other basket-making techniques, in particular the relation of baskets to the theory of graphs on surfaces, and, by that connection, in baskets that can be generated as words in formal languages.
Artworks
Red Strands: Six genus-0 maps with non-crossing Eulerian circuits
12 x 40 x 35 cm
Light box and twisted nylon monofilament
2017
Scaffold-strand self-assembly of DNA uses a long single-stranded DNA (the scaffold) and many shorter single strands (staples) to self-assemble basket-like assemblies that are representable as graphs embedded in the sphere (genus-0 topology). This scheme requires the scaffold strand to trace a non-crossing Eulerian circuit (A-trail) in the graph traversing every edge just once, while always making either a hard left or hard right turn when it reaches a vertex. These six "baskets" are my first efforts at using this weaving technique at macro scale. The scaffold strand is red, the staples are clear. (Triple helices, rather than the double helices of biology, have been used to avoid the awkwardness of having staple/staple splices at mid-edge.)