Order into Chaos
Designer and Artist: Carolyn Yackel
Material and Method: Temari
Year of Creation: 2022
Order into Chaos is the pentakis dodecahedron cross-section of a larger in-progress piece consisting of thirty-nine temari balls depicting each of thirteen Catalan solids with three different interwoven stitching plans.
(1) The red and white stars are formed at five-fold vertices by outlining the edges of the spherical pentakis dodecahedron. Six-fold vertices on the same ball do not have stars.
(2) Each face of the pentakis dodecahedron has a gold, white, and red triangle stitched around the midpoints of its spherical edges producing a truncation.
(3) One gold outlining triangle is stitched around each face of the pentakis dodecahedron of the third ball, with vertices of the stitched triangle taken 1.5 cm away from the original vertices on angle bisectors of the underlying spherical faces on a 27.5cm circumference temari. The ensuing visual effect entices the order seeker to search for an elusive, but not quite existent repetitive pattern, while the inevitable failure of the temari base to be an exact sphere and the stitching points to be exactly correctly located, as they must fall on one side or the other of a thread cause the pattern to descend into chaos.
Together the three spheres show how some stitching patterns can be more successful at hiding imperfections in our physical world than others, highlighting the benefits and challenges of handcraft.
Reference: Yackel, C.A. Representing Catalan Solids in Temari. Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.