So he experimented with cutting shapes out of the paper first,
sending tiny specs of light across the room. Still, Schepker
was not satisfied.
“I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew I’d know it
when I saw it.”
The real breakthrough came when, one day, Schepker
decided to put a light bulb into a cube made of glass panes.
The light streamed through with only the edges of the shape
appearing as shadowy projections on the walls. This was
what he was looking for.
Now Schepker makes lamps of all different shapes out
of clear and coloured glass. His inspiration comes from
W
hen you look at the tiling patterns that cover the
walls of the Alhambra in Spain, or raise your eyes
to the intricate patterns on the ceiling of the Tomb of Hafez
in Iran, you feel almost as though you are entering another
dimension. The shapes seem to move and sway as your
eyes shift in and out of focus.
“It’s a very prominent over the top kind of patterning that you
don’t see in any other culture,” says Soheila Esfahani, artist
and lecturer at the University of Waterloo.
Yet underlying their complexity, these patterns are composed
of simple geometric shapes – just a
few circles, squares, and strategically “This type of
drawn lines.
becomes a
“When geometry becomes visual, it
becomes art,” says Esfahani. She is currently teaching a
course on geometric patterns in Islamic art, which was also
the topic of her Bridges Lecture.
Image after image, Esfahani broke down the complexity of
the geometric patterns that adorn many buildings in Iran,
showing how they can be drawn in a few simple steps
using only a compass and ruler. Some, like arabesques,
are patterns derived from foliage, while others are derived
anything and everything.
“I just discover some shape that interests me somehow,”
explains Schepker.
That shape can be an origami sculpture by Tom Hull or the
600-cell that he is now working on. In his Bridges lecture,
he talked about creating a genus-6 lamp that embodied the
solution to a certain graph-embedding problem, though he
still has to figure out how to make the curved glass pieces.
Now Schepker travels to many high-schools and middle
schools, using his unique glass creations to teach geometry
concepts, because for him, it’s not about the pretty colours,
it’s about the shapes.
from groups of intersecting circles. The results are stunning
configurations that capture the eye.
But Esfahani shares the view that the use of patterns rooted
in geometry serves a much bigger purpose.
“This type of geometry becomes an intermediary, a passage
to get to something else… it becomes a metaphor,” she
explains.
Even though the patterns may be culturally specific, the
geometry is abstract, allowing connection on another level.
Esfahani quotes the well-known art
geometry … historian and archaeologist, Oleg
Grabar:
metaphor.”
“Humble triangles on a dress or in the
weaving of a basket or the very sophisticated brick walls in
Iranian towers share an ability to make us wonder what they
mean, because, like moths or butterflies, we are attracted
to an abstraction which seems to be devoid of cultural
specificity. It is only meant to be beautiful.”
Mathematics has often been called the universal language –
pi is still the same number whether you’re in Iran or Canada.
Geometry is a special case of this idea that captures the
visual imagination.
Tomb of
Hafez roof
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