Erin Peña

Statement

I first began weaving with beads when I was in my early teens. I learned how to make trinket boxes, essentially prisms with bases in different shapes; triangles, squares, pentagons. Eventually I began to combine these base shapes together, moving away from the box format into pure geometry. My craft is driven by curiosity. I have no formal training in geometry, but I learn a little more every day, through the hands-on engineering of my sculptures. I see the world as a series of puzzles, components fitting together in a way that my brain works to recreate with beads. It is an intensely joyful experience to live in the world this way. Through my art I achieve a deeper communion with the universe than I might have ever thought possible.

Artworks

This piece revealed itself to me slowly. I am always trying to make new shapes, or rather to combine shapes in new and interesting ways, and “Time Machine” grew out of my fixation on a ring or disk. I saw it suspended in space, a relic from an older space-faring civilization. Maybe it was defunct, or maybe it was simply waiting. “Time Machine” was the first piece that I had ever used a compass and straightedge to sketch. The arrangement of its parts in a ring was unfamiliar territory for me visually, and I needed the assistance of the compass to see how it would lie. From that initial sketch I was able to understand the proportions of my components and how I would need to construct them in relation with every phase of the sculpture.

“Neon Buckyball” was my first experiment with an entirely new beading technique. The framework construction, with an inner and outer surface of slightly different areas, required precise measurements to fit everything together seamlessly. The color arrangement of the neons rings is based on a toy I had as a child. It was a soccer ball with four different colors of hexagons and pentagons. The puzzle was to arrange the colors in such a way that no color touched itself. There was a trick to it, one I figured out over hundreds of rebuilds. I still have a fondness for the buckyball shape, and the inherent elegance of its construction. I’ve tried this beading technique with many other shapes, but none work quite as intuitively as the buckyball.