FEATURED PROJECT

Playing with shapes by Janice Smith

Janice's current work is piece that has been developing and evolving over the past months. Initially Janet wanted to make a lampshade for her room. We began by looking at making images that were contained within geometric shapes that could link together in various ways.  We settled on pentagons which could be formed to make a ten sided shape. (dodecahedron).

Sheets containing over sixty shapes and symbols were printed out for Janice to choose from.  She choose two shapes for each pentagon and decided the colour of each shape and the colour of the pentagon then how they should be arranged.

The images on each pentagon were created using two shapes that were overlayed onto each other.  Janice (who has severe mobility issues) started out by manipulating (bending, twisting, turning) the shapes on the computer as she had done in previous projects.

It soon became apparent that Janice prefered the precision that was achieved by selecting shapes, choosing colours and combining those shapes within the pentagons. Once she completed ten pentagons we then printed them onto back lit film, the individual pentagons were then cut out and stuck together to make a dodecahedron which could be used as her lampshade.

At the heart of the project is choice.  Each time we produced a sew set of shapes the number of choices for the next stage of the project was increased.

Once she completed ten pentagons we then printed them onto back lit film, the individual pentagons were then cut out and stuck together to make a dodecahedron which could be used as her lampshade.

We decided to continue making more dodecahedrons as the Light Matters exhibition was approaching and these would fit into the theme of light. She ended up creating seven dodecahedrons for the exhibition.

Once the work was completed for the exhibition we continued to play with the shapes and realised that we could make patterns with the pentagons.  We first tried mixing six shapes together and produced interesting results.

We then began adding pentagons around these shapes slowly making them bigger. We then looked at alternating the colours  by choosing pentagons from different sets.

Each of these shapes ended up forming a pentagon shape this allowed us to continue adding these shapes together making increasingly complex sets of shapes.

The final pentagon shapes that Janice has produced contain 29791 of the original pentagons.

This work is continuing and we are experimenting with creating other patterns using the shapes produced.