Gabriele Meyer

Statement

I like to crochet hyperbolic surfaces, shapes with waves. These can be lamps or other decorative hanging sculptures. In the past year, I focused on making white lamps with undulating wavy layers around the outside.These layers are actually just one spiraling surface, but they look as if they were individual parallel fibers. Art lives on repetition, that's why this appeals to us. The colorful tower of hyperbolic disks was much easier to make, just one disk at a time, all of them curved negatively to varying degrees.

Artworks

This is a hanging sculpture of 16 hyperbolic disks. Some of them are curved very little, they are almost flat and look like potato chips. Others are curved more and will eventually look like some corals on an ocean reef. The challenge here was to crochet them flat long enough and then start the hyperbolic crochet with enough increase to produce at least 5 waves around the perimeter. Stacked vertically, I think of them as hyperbolic "beads" on a string.

Due to the size of this surface and the difficulty to ship it, I am submitting this as a photograph. The basic shape is a cylinder on an oval base. Around this I crocheted a spiral. The spiral surface became wavy because of the hyperbolic crochet.