Matthew Huang Cummins

Artists

Matthew Huang Cummins

Adjunct Faculty

Segal Design Institute, Northwestern University

Evanston, IL

http://www.matthewcummins.com

Statement

"Ubi materia, ibi geometria" - Johannes Kepler "Where there is matter, there is geometry" My first deep dive into the beautiful symmetries of Platonic and Archimedean solids came during a college course in crystallography. How fascinating that the properties of our material world are determined by the geometry of the spaces between atoms. Each textbook diagram exploded off the page for me as sculpture. For the nearly thirty years since, I have used computer-aided design to meditate on these forms. My work in manufacturing has provided a toolset for realizing them as physical objects. Now, I enjoy paying it forward, teaching what I have learned at all levels, from pre-schools to graduate design courses.

Artworks

Image for entry 'Coils in Equilibrium' — Coils in Equilibrium
30 x 36 x 30 cm
Cast Bronze
2017

Shrink this bronze sculpture to roughly half a billionth of its size and the thirteen spheres could align perfectly with the atoms in a piece of gold. Inspired by the face-centered cubic (FCC) crystal structure, it also displays the underlying geometry of a cuboctahedron. Buckminster Fuller coined the term Vector Equilibrium to describe this Archimedean solid, and Leonardo da Vinci illustrated it for Luca Pacioli's mathematics textbook, De Divina Proportione. Coils in Equilibrium was cast in a single pour using a lost-wax casting process that is over 6,000 years old. In place of a sculpted wax pattern, however, the "wax" for this piece was achieved using a modern 3D printing technology... truly a case of old school meets new.