Jiangmei Wu

Kallos is a Greek word for beauty that pays homage to natural folds, folds of the worlds (how various cultures use folds, pleats, wraps, and drapes in clothing) , and in contemporary fashion in works such as Alexander McQeen's Oyster dress). It explores the connections between folds, body, material, and movement. As a wearable wrap made out of multiple small folds, Body and Pleats embraces the volume and depth of the folds, and the natural silhouettes of the folded material as it drapes over the body. It provides a sensual feel and appearance for the wearer. The wearer's body glides through the world, separated only by this second skin of folds and unfolds. Kallos is part of a series of ongoing works on fabric origami that are based on a technique the artist calls “tessellation grafting.” To graft a tessellation, one starts by cutting along all the edges figuratively, creating a new tessellation by inserting rectangles, again, figuratively, along all the edges and polygons connecting the vertices. If a vertex in the original tessellation has a valence of three, then the polygon connecting the now-separated vertices must be a triangle. If a vertex in the original tessellation has a valence of four, then the polygon connecting the new vertices must be a quadrangle. In general, for vertices that are n-valent, the inserting polygons must be n-gons. To make the fabric origami, the corners of new polygons are sewn together, collapsing the polygons back to points and rectangles back to lines. On one side of the sewn fabric, the seams are now reflecting the original pattern. On the other side of the fabric, the fabric is carefully pleated and flattened to create a new tessellation. Interestingly, the tessellation grafting is rooted in the dual graph of a plane graph G in graph theory. ​