Artists
Jiangmei Wu
Associate Professor
Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design, Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Statement
The process of making fabric origami can be highly technical and time-consuming. By adding a dimension of mathematical complexity and technical skills into what is traditionally viewed as a “women’s craft,” I hope to continue to create, and encourage others to create, more fabric origami. My goal is to help blur the boundaries between high art and low art, between the domestic and the public spheres, and between traditionally perceived male and female roles.
Artworks
Fabric origami is the art of using the fabric manipulation and origami techniques to alter the texture of the original fabric to create a new fabric that is endowed with novel visual and tactile characteristics. Previously, I explored a tessellation grafting technique to generate sewing patterns consisting of polygons for fabric origami, how to generate crease patterns from sewing pattern, as well showcased a variety of examples of fabric origami art in various scales. Here I'm showing a new example of fabric origami tessellation in which corners of irregular polygons are sewn together. The overall design is based on the Root Two system, or Ad Quadratum, of Islamic geometry, which exhibits 8-fold rotational symmetry.