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My father was an industrial
designer and I was brought up to be curious about how things are
made and to look for similarities in structures.
In the 1980s, when I was living in South-East Asia, my original
interest in woven textiles gradually turned towards baskets.
Plaiting is a common construction method for baskets in this
part of the world, using flat material such as palm leaf.
On returning to Oxford, I began working on a database of the
basketry in the Pitt Rivers Museum. In 2004, at the suggestion
of Professor Tibor Tarnai, I started to experiment with cubes
woven on the skew.
The first time I wove such a cube I was astonished at the way in
which the weaving elements tracked around the cube. I have since
made several ‘families of cubes’ using nets drawn on squared
paper. I have used these when trying to identify groups of cubes
with shared characteristics.
In July 2006 I showed a woven cube in the Bridges exhibition in
London. Attending the conference gave me more confidence to
pursue this subject further. In October 2006 Tibor Tarnai
delivered a paper in Beijing entitled
Baskets
which
confirmed some of my findings and posed some more questions.
The paper,
Exploring Cubes Woven on
the Skew, that I have written for
Bridges 2007,
outlines some of my findings. This website takes things a bit
further and summarises some of the results. Nets are available
for you to printout for yourself. I hope you will enjoy
exploring the cubes.
Felicity
Wood Oxford August 2007 |
