Sculptures

Art with mathematical structure

I was talking to a visitor to my exhibition “>65 Images“. We were looking at a sculpture I had made out of twigs. It followed the pattern of a Pythagorean spiral, also known as the square root spiral. Mathematically, you can prove that the lines of the spiral never cross, because the square roots that make up the arms of the spiral never repeat themselves. However, in reality the arms that make up the spiral have width, which pushes the spiral away from perfection, so the arms, inevitably, do cross. We talked about whether this was a problem and decided that the “imperfection” was something that we tolerated because we could appreciate that there was an underlying consistency to the structure. The art work paid homage to this structure. My visitor said that this was because it was “a work of art with a mathematical structure”. 

I like this description of what I have tried to create in many of the pieces shown in this web site. 

Pythagorean Twig Spiral