Richard Hammack

Statement

My recent work is a mixture of printmaking, publishing and pedagogy. I make small-scale constructions that can be quickly printed on an office copier, then scored, cut, folded, glued and assembled in large quantities. Lately I've been experimenting with other printable materials, such as cardboard and plascore. In these visual mathematical essays, I strive to hit a sweet spot between humor and pedagogy. I always want the viewer to laugh or smile -- and wonder.

Artworks

This rugged container is a surface of genus 5 in which the 5-cube graph is embedded, with 40 square regions. The surface is the union of half of the faces of the 5-cube's 2-skeleton, projected to 3-space via local perspective (i.e. each cubic 3-facet appears as a cube or a cube in perspective). The result is a model of the 5-cube showing all vertices and edges -- plus half the faces, which fit together edge-to-edge to form a closed surface with no self-intersections.