Francesco Mancini
Artists
Statement
I'm an eclectic origami designer: I like to create modular polyhedra and stars but also animals, boxes, and multi-piece tessellations. Since I discovered origami I liked the possibilities it gave me to translate in a physical form lots of concepts and objects of mathematics. I work as a guide in a math museum and paper-folding is a very useful tool to show the beauty and fun of geometry (or arithmetics or algebra) to kids of all ages.
Artworks
Icosidō
10 x 10 x 10 cm
"Elephant hide" Paper
2017
This is a modular origami made from 12 units. I folded each unit from an uncut regular pentagon, and I assembled them without glue. The finished model has the shape of a Small dodecahemidodecahedron, a nonconvex uniform polyhedron. The folding sequence is very simple and it leaves the faces (12 pentagons and 10 decagons) clean. Instead, the assembly can be a little tricky due to the odd nature of the pentagon. Since at a first look it resembles an Icosidodecahedron (they share the same convex hull) and it was made with a Japanese art I named this work Icosidō (dō = the way of).
With the same principle applied to a square sheet it's possible to build, with 30 units, a model close to a faceted Rombicosidodecahedron https://flic.kr/p/2b5JiVn