More Fibonacci Mobiles
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Steel Wire and Watercolor Paper
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This is Alison Frane's original Fibonacci mobile, the one that started it all. It is currently hanging in the home of Marv and Elaine Wunderlich.
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Steel Wire and Art Paper
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This mobile was made for Sarah Tyson's sculpture class at Great Mills High School. Her students had just completed a unit on the work of Alexander Calder and were about to begin their own wire sculpture projects. In order to get the mobile into school in a timely fashion, we initially stopped at eight hanging elements. Once we have time, we are planning to build it up to thirteen.
Notice that there is a slight variation in the mobile's Fibonacci recursion: the red trapezoids that hang from 2-element bars are pointing downward while the red trapezoids that hang from 3-element bars are pointing upwards.
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Steel Wire and Beach Glass
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A group of us here in Southern Maryland arranged a little mobile-making party, and Maribeth Boeke Ganzell was the host. She had some beach glass she wanted to make into a mobile, but the special drill bit she bought gave out after the eighth piece of glass. When we noticed that three of the drilled glass pieces were green and five were white, we decided we were fated to make another Fibonacci mobile.
Since the bits of glass are all different sizes, the balance points for this mobile are not spaced according to the Fibonacci ratios. Nonetheless, scaling the bars by the golden ratio still seems to work well. We added some extra wire loops above some of the bars to create drops and enhance the mobile's tiered structure.
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Wooden Dowels, Thread and Glass Beads
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In this Fibonacci mobile, the bars are scaled by the golden ratio and the thread lengths follow the Fibonacci pattern: the blue-green beads hang one unit down, the red-yellow beads hang two units down, the 2-bead bars hang three units down, the 3-bead bars hang five units down, the 5-bead bars hang eight units down, and so forth. The photographs above show an 8-bead bar, a 13-bead bar, and the entire 21-bead mobile.
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Brass Wire
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In this mobile, a work in progress, the Fibonacci numbers are the mobile. Alison plans to build the mobile up to thirteen, and pictures of the later stages will be posted here as they emerge. Naturally, this might take a while.
Alison has carefully oriented the words so that the viewer can read them all at once from the right angle.
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Schematic of a Wooden Mobile
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Dean Ballard independently developed the idea of a mobile that follows the Fibonacci recursion. He found these pages through a web search and emailed me to share his beautiful work. His mobile incorporates a simple depth rule that makes the components of each size line up nicely, displaying a further level of Fibonacci structure.
For a detailed account of the patterns in Ballard's wooden mobile, photographs, and video, take a look at Dean Ballard's Fibonacci Mobile Page.
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The Mobile Workshop at Wunderland.Earth
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