Jiangmei Wu

Statement

I work in the overlapping space of art, design, mathematics, technology, and engineering by exploring the conceptual grounds, the geometric and tectonic forms, the mathematical understandings, and the material applicability of origami and origami-inspired design. In particular, I am interested in how to explore folding through spatial art installations, how to invent new folding designs based on mathematical understandings, how to digitally fabricate these new designs and structures in various materials (not necessarily paper), and most importantly, I am interested in exploring how these aspects work together within the conceptual and physical spaces in which they occur.

Artworks

The fabric origami work is 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. To make the fabric origami, the corners of new polygons are sewn together, collapsing the polygons back to points and rectangles back to lines. Interestingly, the tessellation grafting is rooted in the dual graph of a plane graph G in graph theory. While this work is based on the duality of the Voronoi diagram and the Delaunay triangulation, other dualities can be further explored.