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Leonardo,Vol. 4, pp. 55-57. Pergamon Press 1971. Printed in Great Britain NOTES In thissectionof Lronardotextsnot exceeding about 1200wordswillbepublished. Notes willnot be accompanied by abstracts and, generally, only three black and white illustrations will be allowed. Accepted Notes will be published more quickly than longer texts. SCULPTURE: ON MY CONSTRUCTIONS Matthew Frere-Smith* I The scaleat which a work of sculpture is intended to be executed is a critical factor in its conception. Not only is scaledirectly related to the work‘s immediate environment but some techniques of forming materials while suitable on a small scale become quite impractical on a large scale. The techniques used in my constructions facilitate the free flow of conception and execution from one extreme of scale to another. The goal always at the back of my mind of enlarging maquettes to architectural proportions has been an important factor in bringing me to my present stageofdevelopment. Ican nowin the design process anticipate, at one extreme, the massproduction of multiples and, at the other, the erection of structures of gigantic proportions. My exploration of three-dimensional form first developedfrom an academic background concerned with the external appearance of natural forms. It then evolved through a concern with convex-concave or positive-negative relationships, with penetration of solids, with simplification of surfaces, and with unwrapping of a shell and its breakdown into units and their re-assembly in terms of internal or depth structure. I followeda nowfamiliartwentiethcentury pattern, albeit largely intuitive rather than intellectual, but naturally derivative and running parallel to technical developments and scientific discoveries of the nature of matter and space. The units were bounded by straight lines in the form of a triangle and attached at the apexes. I used similar shapes in my drawings from nature in an attempt to create something other than illusions of reality. The areas of tone became dense, separated out, and lines existed on their own. Eventually, abandoning the contrived random shaping of these Artist living at 2A Quebec Road, Norwich NOR-35S, England. (Received 15 September 1969.) triangles, I made them equilateral and similar in size, and started to evolve systematic orders in which to arrange them in space. It was at this stage, with great excitement, that thought and knowledge began to be integrated into my working process. Having stumbled into geometry on the workbench and discovered a four-axial system inherent in the use of the tetrahedron, I turned to learn from the theoretical research of others about the various possible divisions of space and the geometry of structures [I]. I became absorbed in nature’s family of closely related forms. Numbers took on a real meaning, for instance, the origin of the decimal and the binary ways of counting became apparent to me. Around the twelve vertices of a icosahedron, which all lie on a spherical surface, are groups of five equilateral triangles giving two times ten faces with sixtimesfiveedges. Theseare equated in the formula of Euler [2], with the addition of a constant two, to the fundamental groups:convex-concave, polarity of structure in space and the two extremes in scale. A sphere shrunk infinitely small becomes a point and expanded to infinity its surface becomes a plane [3]. Thus space can be formed from a point outwards or from a plane inwards. Electron photomicrographs have shown us virus structures with icosahedral symmetry [4]. Modern psychology of perception considers an individual observer as being at the centre of an infinite sphere. It appears to me that there is a universal structural system that applies to all nature’s forms. n The reference to nature in my work is to the structure in depth of matter rather than to the surface structure it may assume, though I am aware 55 56 Mcitthew Frcre-Smith Fig. 1. ‘Perspex and Nylon’, height 18 in., 1965. (Collection of Erno Gold3nger, London.) Fig. 2. ‘Tenso-structure’,aluminium, height 6 ft., 1966. that some of my constructions relate to a direct visual experience of objects in nature. Since I believe that somewhere along the spectrum of scale any man-made form must find its counterpart in nature, I do not consider the term ‘abstract’ as applicable to my...

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