CUBES WOVEN ON THE SKEW

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Felicity Wood 93 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HL, UK    felicityswood@gmail.com

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 of Budapest University of Technology and Economics, 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 (.pdf), that I wrote 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 print out for yourself. I hope you will enjoy exploring the cubes.

Picture credit: Liz Yardley.

Web pages are best printed out in landscape format.