Martin and Erik Demaine
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Bio: Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine are a father-son math-art team. Martin founded the first private hot glass studio in Canada and has been called “the father of Canadian glass.” Since 2005, Martin Demaine has been an artist in residence at MIT, joining Erik, an MIT professor in computer science. Martin received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. Father and son work together in paper, glass, and other materials. They use their exploration in sculpture to help visualize and understand unsolved problems in science, and they use their scientific abilities to inspire new art forms. Their artistic work includes curved origami sculptures that are held in the permanent collections of MoMA in New York City and in the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. Their scientific work includes over sixty published joint papers, several of which combine mathematics and art. In 2013 they won a Guggenheim Fellowship to explore the folding of materials such as hot glass.
Statement: We use our exploration in sculpture to help visualize and understand unsolved problems in science, and our scientific abilities to inspire new art forms. This book sculpture is a modular combination of several interacting pieces. Each piece is folded along concentric circular creases, from a sheet of paper printed with overlapping pages from Graham Greene's short story “The Destructors” (1954). The paper folds itself into a natural equilibrium form based on these creases, a process not yet understood mathematically. We “weave” the pieces together by squeezing one piece to fit inside the hole of another, let these pieces relax into a natural resting state, and then glue them to prevent shifting. We loved the chaos and confusion of the movie Donnie Darko (2001), in which the characters are inspired by Greene's (real) short story, whose central tenet is that “destruction after all is a form of creation.” This story seemed ideal for our process, which obscures and slices the text into an unreadable “book,” effectively upcycling the story into a new sculptural form.
Statement: We use our exploration in sculpture to help visualize and understand unsolved problems in science, and our scientific abilities to inspire new art forms. This book sculpture is a modular combination of several interacting pieces. Each piece is folded along concentric circular creases, from a sheet of paper printed with overlapping pages from Graham Greene's short story “The Destructors” (1954). The paper folds itself into a natural equilibrium form based on these creases, a process not yet understood mathematically. We “weave” the pieces together by squeezing one piece to fit inside the hole of another, let these pieces relax into a natural resting state, and then glue them to prevent shifting. We loved the chaos and confusion of the movie Donnie Darko (2001), in which the characters are inspired by Greene's (real) short story, whose central tenet is that “destruction after all is a form of creation.” This story seemed ideal for our process, which obscures and slices the text into an unreadable “book,” effectively upcycling the story into a new sculptural form.