daniela bertol

Statement

My art and design practice is inspired by geometry at different scales, methodologies and media, including video, land and perfomance art, sculpture and fashion. Mathematics has also been as a component of a theory of form: a unification of dualisms in humankind and nature, embodiment of mind constructions into phenomenological experiences. 3D printed and laser cut sculptures are based on three-dimensional symmetry, spirals and recursions, the subject of two educational interactive and multimedia publications Regular Polyhedra and the Star and Archimedean Solids Recently I am working on the psychosomatic practice "Healing Geometries" started from my doctoral research "Form Mind Body Space Time - the Geometry of Human Movement."

Artworks

The series "Phyllotaxis: Nature and Numbers" comprises images generated by parametric variations of the divergence angle c. Such angle is used Vogel’s formula used to create a computational model of the sunflower head: q = n ∗ 137.5◦, r= c√n, In these formula n is the ordering number of a floret in the sunflower head and q the angle between a reference direction and the position vector of the nth floret in a polar coordinate system originating at the center of the head. The divergence angle c in the sunflower head is equal to the golden angle approximated to = 137.5°. In the series c varies according to different increment generating unexpected visual results as in the presented image "Phyllotaxis: 3-increment".

“Spiraling Tetrahedron” is a 3D printed scale models of the series “Spiraling Polyhedra” envisioned as public art project: functional sculptures of complex formal configurations shaped according to the symmetry of the five Platonic solids. The form is characterized by the mapping of helicoidal paths on a spherical regular tetrahedron; the path is a spiral in the orthogonal projection centered on a polyhedron vertex. The helicoidal shape centered on a vertex continues in other helices centred on the adjacent vertices creating double-end spiral sets, which resemble Euler (Cornu) spirals comprised of arc of splines in three-dimensional space.