I am an explorer. In 2017, a visit to the Smithsonian inspired me to explore symmetry and tessellations. I created an application called Polygonia.design, a collection of vector-based graphic design tools.
The vision was to create physical versions of the designs made in Polygonia, something to manipulate and interact with, something to pick up and look at from different angles, something to set in the window or to wear.
Every material and every medium becomes an area to explore. What could be done with wood? Paper? Acrylic? Fabric? 3D printing? How could designs be layered? How will the shapes within the designs interact with each other? Should the focus be on the negative space or the positive? The possibilities are endless.
“Asterisk” was created by replacing each face of a cube with a cube, yielding a shape with a pleasant balance between volume and open space and a combination of concave and convex dihedral angles. The concave and convex angles allow for more interactions between the faces than possible with a fully convex shape. The thirty faces are identical and were designed in Polygonia.design.
“Dichroic Crystal" was inspired by the ever-changing color of dichroic acrylic, where the color and shadow vary by the viewing angle of the acrylic. I wanted a shape that would present the acrylic in a multitude of directions. The shape was created by replacing each edge of a icosahedron with a rhombus where the short dimension length is the length of the icosahedron edge and the long dimension length is twice the radius of the midsphere. The rhombus was designed in Polygonia.design. Interestingly, the aspect ratio of the rhombus is the golden ratio.
