Thursday, January 21, 2010

Platonic and Archimedean Solids / Symmetry: The Ordering Principle

I got these for christmas, they're both properly amazing, not just visually, the content was/is really, really inspiring. Daud Sutton wrote and illustrated the first ('Platonic and Archimedean...'), and although I've had an interest in the way polyhedra looks, the connection between the content of the book - the ideas behind each shape, what they represent, and various three-dimensional mathematic theories - and the beautiful drawings, made it easy to engage with what the shapes actually mean and why they exist. I know it seems kind of lame saying we need pretty pictures to actually be interested in something, but I think as an artist, our role is to deliver content in a meaningful way. Without either of these books looking nice and being collectable/desirable to own, a majority of people - probably including myself - wouldn't have stumbled across any of the incredible theories and questions this work opens up. The second book was equally as good, how the author and illustrator - David Wade - manages to produce such a small and concise book on such a huge subject is beyond me. Again looking at the pretty pictures and reading through this work generated a huge amount of ideas, to the point my head kind of started to hurt. Attempting to produce a book of a similar calibre would be far too over-ambitious for me to even consider within the time constraints of this project, and I need to improve my time-management. But these needed to be commented on, as I imagine my exhibition piece/book will take a great deal of inspiration from these two book, in terms of their incredibly successful execution of content delivery.

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