2022 Bridges Conference

Amy Wendt

Artists

Amy Wendt

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Wisconsin--Madison

Madison, WI, USA

wendt@engr.wisc.edu

Statement

My affinity for craft and passion for fiber and textiles arose growing up among talented family members and in an era that placed me among those students required as young teens to learn sewing. (My sewing cohort, including me, were also barred from classes where we might have learned certain other technical crafts.) Later on, I was fortunate to acquire university training in the skills and sensibilities of the engineering profession. While I am rooted in textile traditions, my technical background has led me to a point where creative impulses emerge now most strongly at the intersection, where textile crafting is both inspired in design and informed in process by science, engineering and math.

Artworks

Image for entry '"Storm at Sea" Plus Random Numbers: Illustration of Varignon's Theorem'

"Storm at Sea" Plus Random Numbers: Illustration of Varignon's Theorem

133 x 133 cm

textile/quilt

2022

The perfect regularity and symmetry of the traditional "Storm at Sea" patchwork quilt block has been disrupted here by shifting, in tandem, neighboring vertices of only the white and navy blue quadrilaterals, Each pair of offset vertices is placed at a random position along the edge of the respective square or rectangle in which the quadrilateral is inscribed (A. Kreiner, Bridges 2020). The 41 light blue innermost quadrilaterals connect the midpoints of the edges of the white asymmetric quadrilaterals, and each is a visual illustration of Varignon's Theorem, which proves that its shape must be a parallelogram. Finally, it can be shown that the inner light blue parallelograms are not rhombi, although it appears that they might be.