2023 Bridges Conference Art Exhibition
Katherine A Seaton
Artists
Katherine A Seaton
Adjunct Associate Professor of Mathematics
Department of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, La Trobe University
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Statement
I am a mathematician, university lecturer (retired) and some-time fiber artist. I delight in the mathematics that can be experienced in the construction, by hand, of pieces of knitting, crochet and embroidery, and in the thought that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers constructed mathematics this way, too. I frequently, but not exclusively, use recycled or remnant materials. Sashiko is a stitching technique born of frugality. Its domestic origin, together with its geometry and symmetry, instantly appealed to me when I became aware of this embroidery style.
Artworks
.jpg&w=1536&q=75)
Jubilee has been created by using a novel recursion relation to generate a string of seventy binary digits to specify the state of the vertical and horizontal lines of hitomezashi (sashiko) stitching. The polyominoes created by the interaction of the lines are Fibonacci snowflakes of various orders. Hitomezashi thus provides an alternative way to generate these mathematical objects. Superposed on the platinum-shade threads of the hitomezashi, the largest polyomino present has been outlined in blackwork. It is the order six Fibonacci snowflake, just as seventy is the sixth Pell number.