Artists
Statement
Uttam Grandhi is an Elastic Mind Enthusiast based in Los Angeles, CA. For over two decades, he has worked across design, fabrication, programming, electronics, and the arts, embracing the full breadth of creative and technical practice. He believes that sustained exposure to unrelated disciplines creates unexpected connections, and that this cross-pollination, often subconscious, is where the most interesting work emerges. Like most of his work, this piece is a product of that process. What began as a curiosity about LED filaments became an investigation into graph theory, topology, and geometric structure. The result is a sculpture that sits equally comfortably in an electronics lab, an art gallery, and a mathematics classroom.
Artworks
LED lights/filaments are polarized: each one has a positive and a negative terminal. Replacing every edge of a polyhedron with a filament produces a glowing sculpture, but only if the underlying graph is bipartite: its vertices must split into two groups such that every edge connects a positive terminal to a negative one.
The simplest such polyhedron is the cube. The next isohedra that can be realized with this technique is the rhombic dodecahedron, with 24 edges and 12 congruent rhombic faces. Its eight positive vertices form a cube; its six negative vertices sit on the Cartesian axes.