Frieze Frame
Glass beads, crochet cotton thread
2015
Mathematical Beauty–AAAS Gallery Exhibit, Washington, DC, March–June 2019
Bridges Art Exhibition, Baltimore, July–August 2015
Bridges 2015 Connections Between Mathematics and Art–Townson University Center for the Arts Gallery, Towson, MD, June–July 2015
The frieze groups describe the various symmetries of two-dimensional patterns that repeat in a single direction, like decorative borders in many traditional artworks. This bead crochet disk with 6471 beads shows patterns for each of the seven frieze groups. Although the strips bend around the circle, warping the planar symmetries, each strip consists of three rounds of beads with the same number of beads in each round, and so its design is equivalent to a straight-strip design with unwarped translations, reflections, rotations and/or glide reflections. I am indebted to Brigitte Servatius, whose charming paper The Geometry of Folding Paper Dolls led me to consider an artwork incorporating frieze patterns.
Frieze Frame is one of the artworks that appears in my Bridges 2017 proceedings paper, A Survey of Symmetry Samplers.