Charlene Morrow

Statement

My main artistic medium is origami through which I try to understand mathematical ideas by expressing them visually. I am deeply impressed by the ways that visually pleasing art often emerges through the process of trying to gain a deeper understanding of the mathematical ideas I set out to explore. My current work is inspired by origami birthday gifts I have created for friends. I now seek to expand that work to include gifts for all birthdays from 1 to 101 that are beautiful, mathematically interesting and offer a puzzle solving experience for the recipient. I have used combinatorial ideas to color origami quilts and polyhedra for birthdays, and I am now exploring a set of representations of prime numbers that are surprisingly symmetric.

Artworks

This origami quilt was created as a 16th birthday gift, and shows how powers of 2 lead to 16. Each of the powers of 2 are represented by paper of a different pattern or color. The “twinning” process is indicated by small black squares where each element in the 2n level doubles (e.g., gives birth to twins) in the 2n+1 level. Also these black squares are the visible portion of the connectors that hold the quilt together. Though exponential growth might be somewhat obvious to a person who is mathematically experienced, it can take a great deal of observation and thinking for the novice, a bonus puzzle aspect of the gift. This quilt can do double duty as a gift for a 61st birthday as there are a total of 61 squares of paper used to make it.