George W. Hart
Florality gives a sense of being a
complex world covered with floral vines. It may look
confusing at first, but the more you study it, the more symmetry
and regularity you can find. It is a table-top piece,
about 9 inches in diameter, made of thirty identical 3 mm thick
pieces of laser-cut Baltic birch plywood, stained green on the
outside and purple on the inside. It can be lifted off
this base, which has five-fold symmetry.
This animation gives a better sense of its flowery intricacy.
This animation gives a better sense of its flowery intricacy.
Every part is a flat shape that looks like this.
The overall effect is of a symmetric tangle of vines.
Here's a rendering centered on one of the
twelve places where five "leaves" spiral around a five-fold
axis. There are also twenty places where three leaves
connect in a kind of triskelion. Florality is a
cousin in some ways to The
Sculpture Formerly Known as Swirly, but here there
are 3-fold connections and 5-fold openings instead of 5-fold
connections and 3-fold openings.
This close-up detail shows how the parts are beveled and glued together.