Conan Chadbourne

Statement

My work is motivated by a fascination with the occurrence of mathematical and scientific imagery in traditional art forms, and the mystical, spiritual, or cosmological significance that is often attached to such imagery. Mathematical themes both overt and subtle appear in a broad range of traditional art: Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Buddhist mandalas, intricate tilings in Islamic architecture, restrained temple geometry paintings in Japan, complex patterns in African textiles, geometric ornament in archaic Greek ceramics. Often this imagery is deeply connected with the models and abstractions these cultures use to interpret and relate to the cosmos, in much the same way that modern scientific diagrams express a scientific worldview.

Artworks

This image presents the chiral 4-coloring of the dodecahedron, in stereographic projection from a point on a 5-fold axis of symmetry.

The faces of a regular dodecahedron can be colored using four colors such that each group of like-colored faces is fixed by a 3-fold rotation, which cyclically permutes the other three colors. The resulting 4-coloring is chiral. This image presents a dodecahedron with this chiral 4-coloring, shown in stereographic projection from a point on one of these 3-fold symmetry axes.