In the last few decades string art and structures made using cables and cords have become rather trendy in both art and architecture. The fascination we have developed for such structures is easy to understand when we consider the hypnotic patterns they create while giving an illusion of lightness.
In architecture we have examples such as Santiago Calatrava's harp-like light bridges formed by several cables attached to a central transverse arch supporting the structure.
His son Gabriel Calatrava also took inspiration from strings for his installation for the 92Y Music Festival in New York, in which - inspired by J.S. Bach's The Art of the Fugue, the strings on musical instruments, and the children's game Cat's Cradle - he created a structure with crossing and stretching strings.
Blood red strings were instead employed to create the mesmerising installation "The Key in the Hand" by Chiharu Shiota at the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale.
The artist replicated this idea for the "Gucci 4 Rooms" arty event currently on at the Gucci Ginza boutique in Tokyo. Shiota's "Gucci Herbarium Room" consists indeed in a room crisscrossed by a spider-like web of strings that tightly traps the furniture and accessories scattered around this room.
Yet to find the starting points for these experiments and installations we should maybe go back to the 1800s: between 1839 and 1853, French mathematician Théodore Olivier - a student of French mathematician Gaspard Monge (1746-1818), the inventor of descriptive geometry - designed three dimensional string models to teach and demonstrate this discipline.
Employed as teaching aids, the models, made with frames and movable components, were particularly useful to show the intersection of surfaces. Fabre de Lagrange made in 1872 further models based on these structures, such as the Hyperboloid and Asymptotic Cone.
But mathematics and art have a long historical relationships: mathematicians created via their geometrical investigations in space arty forms while artists used them in their quest for perfection.
Mathematical models ended up inspiring Man Ray who, in 1934, visited the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris and took pictures of its collection of three dimensional models; Naum Gabo also drew direct inspiration from the shapes and forms of models for some of his artworks.
The discovery of mathematical models in Oxford led Barbara Hepworth to create sculptures in which she employed stone and strings. In parallel to the work of Hepworth, Henry Moore used plaster and strings to create beautiful forms.
The artist claimed he had been fascinated by the models at the Science Museum in London stating : "One model had a square at one end with 20 holes along each side…Through these holes rings were threaded and lead to a circle with the same number of holes at the other end. A plane interposed through the middle shows the form that is halfway between a square and a circle…It wasn't the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and see one form within the other which excited me."
In yesterday's post we looked at Alexander Calder who resized his huge mobiles making them wearable and turning them into jewellery, in much the same way, there have been recent experiments by designers who have proved it is possible to turn mathematical aids made with strings and architectural string structures into jewellery pieces.
In the last few years jewellery designer Italo Lupo started experimenting with plastic and rubber materials, integrating them with silver bangles and rings.
While Lupo borrowed the round, square and oblong shapes and styles of his bangles and rings from the jewellery of ancient civilizations such as the Piceni people (from the Abruzzo region where he hails from), the bright and coloured plastic and rubber threads point towards other inspirations, especially mathematical models filtered through the '80s and Fiorucci. Another inspiration Lupo mentions for his bangles is the enneagram of personality.
This model is a typology of nine interconnected personality types represented by the points of a geometric figure called "enneagram" and credited to G. I. Gurdjieff. Oscar Ichazo is generally recognized as the principal source of the contemporary Enneagram of Personality, while Claudio Naranjo developed and taught his own understanding of the Enneagram.
The most interesting thing about the bangles (some of the most architectural ones are characterised by a squarish form) is the fact that the rubber strings seem to anchor the pieces to the arm or the wrist, giving the impression they are suspended in space.
The principle, you may argue, is the same behind the mathematical models: while the latter combined the beauty of mathematics with its usefulness, jewellery pieces derived from the models offer new solutions in form and space to contemporary designers and the chance to experiment with unusual materials as well. When you wear these pieces you indeed get the feeling you're wearing a portable mathematical model or an architectural structure.
You like the idea, but you're looking for something with an art connection? Well, Lupo also developed a limited edition bangle in rainbow coloured strings, dedicating it to Italian artist Franco Summa and to his obsession with vivid combinations of bright shades.
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