Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya

Statement

A child catches snowflakes on their mitten examining an endless variety of elegant and fragile shapes. When Johannes Kepler noticed snowflakes that fell on the lapel of his coat as he crossed the Charles Bridge in Prague, he wrote a booklet trying to explain why they are all hexagonal. When Japanese nuclear physicist Ukichiro Nakaya found himself in an institution with no facilities for nuclear research, he turned to the study snowflakes in nature and artificial ones in his laboratory, and after years of research, made a catalogue of all their possible types. It is probably my longing for snow, which is an incredibly rare phenomenon in Sydney, that makes me reproduce these shapes in paper, following but not limited to Nakaya’s schemes.

Artworks

Modular origami is a perfect means to create regular structures such as snowflakes’ models in all variety and closeness to details, yet leaving space for imagination to create some new shapes with the same hexagonal symmetry. I started with fourteen regular plain modules following Nakaya’s classification and expanded on them with some more designs. These snowflake modules consist of dozens to hundreds of units and are fifteen-twenty cm in diameter.