THROUGH THE TORN PAPER SCREEN

THROUGH THE TORN PAPER SCREEN

THE MILKY WAY

KOBAYASHI ISSA

Through the Torn Paper Screen (from the Haiku poem by Kobayashi Issa) is a work in progress. To date, 360 dodecahedrons (made of 12 identical pentagonal faces) and 40 "Buckyballs" (made of 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal faces) have been cast in glass through a labor-intensive multi-step process. Exhibiting the translucent, "milky" quality of quartz, each piece has been individually molded with variations of color that function as color pixels, pastel marks or brushstrokes. The "eye" is "asked" to blend the colors.

Suspended from the ceiling of an Italian family cantina, in Gagliato, Italy, the glass pieces (ranging in diameter from .5" to 1.5") were arranged in the approximate shape of a logarithmic spiral that references our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

The Dodecahedron, one of the five Platonic solids, was thought by Plato to be "the fifth construction, which God used for embroidering the constellations on the whole heaven."

The 1985 discovery of the Carbon60 molecule, named Buckminsterfullerene or "Buckyball" after the visionary Buckminster Fuller, led to a Nobel Prize in 1996 for the collaborating scientists. Considered to be the "birth of nanotechnology," the discovery of Carbon60 fundamentally advanced electronics, material science, and medicine. In 2010, Buckyballs were detected in massive numbers in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies close to the Milky Way. They have also been found in ordinary candle soot. Poetic and profound, it seems that ancient humans unknowingly drew on cave walls with these tiny strong molecules, and, the furthest observable reaches of space, are filled with them.

-Jo Ann Fleischhauer 2012