2022 Bridges Conference

Jiangmei Wu

Artists

Jiangmei Wu

Associate Professor

Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design, Indiana University

Bloomington, Indiana, USA

jiawu@indiana.edu

http://www.jiangmeiwu.com

Statement

I am intrigued by these naturally occurring folds and how they can be analyzed in order to understand nature. Unfolding a folded design reveals a patterned map of creating and generating. And this map, also called a ‘crease pattern,’ is often the result of counterintuitive deliberation and calculation based on mathematical understanding. While it is difficult to describe the folded form through the visual characteristics of the folds on this map, it is more difficult to reverse engineer and come up with logical patterns of folds that can then be folded into desirable forms. I often employ mathematical understanding and computational algorithms in generating a map of folds.

Artworks

Image for entry 'Grafting Tessellations'

Grafting Tessellations

25 x 25 cm

Cotton

2022

Additional info

To graft a tessellation, one starts by cutting along all edges figuratively and then creating a new tessellation by inserting rectangles, again, figuratively, along all the edges and polygons connecting the vertices. To make the fabric origami, the corners of new polygons are sewn together, collapsing the polygons back to points and rectangles to back to lines. The two works shown as a group here are produced based on a pattern that is created using the tessellation grafting technique described above. One is based on grafting heptagonal and hexagonal tiles in the hyperbolic plane that is mapped into the Euclidean plane using a Poincaré disk. The other one is based on grafting aperiodic pentagonal tiles in a plane.