Asawa pendant

I've been thinking about Ruth Asawa and her work.  If you're not familiar with it, you can find it at ruthasawa.com.  She made gorgeous sculptural shapes out of knitted wire (although I keep seeing it described as crocheted, surely it's Viking knit).  Often there are spheres or cones interlocked with other spheres or cones.  That's what I wanted to play with.  It's made me realize, more than I had, how much geometry is in her work, to get smooth curves and progressions.  This was my first attempt at interlocked spheres.  I wish I could overlap them more, but since in my spheres there are fewer points of entry than in a knitted structure, there were limits to where I could make one sphere go inside another. For example, I couldn't pass through a 5-bead circle, because the hole in the middle isn't big enough to get a bead through it.  I had to just use the 6-bead circles. And if I had done my interlock through the next row of circles, the 2 green balls would have bumped into each other in the middle of the turquoise ball.  I have some ideas about getting around these problems, but that's for future work.  The 2 outer spheres are based on the 90 bead buckyball, but modified to "sprout" a tube at one end.  The 1 in the middle is a 120 bead sphere.  Following my usual path, now I'm working on another version that's a bit less symmetrical.

Offset Icosohedron

Here's a new piece that I owe to Gwen Fisher, although indirectly. On her blog there's a link to lots of mathematical art from the Bridges exhibits. I was amazed by the spherical pieces by George Hart. At the very bottom of the page on http://www.georgehart.com/sculpture/sculpture.html there's a piece that's alot simpler than all the rest, and it was the basis for this piece. It's based on the icosahedron, but instead of each set of 5 triangles meeting at a point, they're offset so they meet at a pentagon. Only problem is that it's a bit too soft, but I've already figured out how to make the next one firmer. In the pentagonal areas, each side shares only 1 edge (2 beads) with the adjoining side. In the next one they'll share an edge (8 beads) and that will firm it up. Also when I made the first section, and made it 6 squares long, I had no idea what the size of the sphere it would generate would be. I think I'd like it to be a bit bigger. This one is around the size of a tennis ball. Of course, in beading, the bigger it is the more it tends toward squishiness, so I hope the added size doesn't undo the gains I get from changing the structure.