Subtracted Squares Rotation 3
Category: Art
Physical memory
A memory of the 3D shapes which were once beneath is absorbed by the paper.
I thought I would add a link to Locard’s principle as well-mentioned by Heather in comments below – fascinating.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locard%27s_exchange_principle
Steel
This one lives in my garden, evenly rusted now.
Paper
I have made this before in silver as a bangle and in steel as a sculpture. I wanted to see how it would turn out made from paper. This was made from thin model-making card which is designed to be pliable when wet and then is fairly rigid when dry.
I handled it too much so the surface has become rougher than I’d like. It’s about 20cms in diameter and 13 cms high. The card is easy to cut with a scalpel and the holes were made with a revolving hole punch. Once the cutting was done, the card was soaked in water and then manhandled until I could tape the ends together. When that tape was dry enough to hold, I compressed the the top and bottom toward each other whilst gently pushing the strips to form the curve.
I really like the way each strip begins to push out beyond its neighbour and tucks itself behind the previous one. In silver, which is more malleable and capable of being compressed and stretched without shearing, I was able to keep compressing the structure until the strips began to fold back on themselves.
Isometric drawing
Here’s another inspirational piece from my father’s large range of work from the 1970s. (a terrible photo, i must find another) The technique is exquisite, a drawing of complexity but made of just two types of line, heavy black ink and very faint black ink, all done with a dipping pen not a modern technical fibre-tip.
The design is created by drawing a simple cube with a missing corner, made of both light and heavy lines, so that the eye cannot read whether they are convex or concave. That simple cube is rotated across the drawing and on subsequent rows, it’s orientation is decided by a pendulum system.
I have been enjoying drawing my own version, even with a good quality drawing pen it is so easy to make irritating errors. I have played around with nversio and adding colour too. Also some of the incidentally outlined shapes seem to suggest ideas for brooches or bangles.
Sally Wakelin - Studies in Creativity 
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