This was originally assigned as 20 Things in 20 Days, but then shrank to scale as social distancing required us to work from home without access to the studio or gallery spaces we had originally planned to use. The idea was to make 10 artworks – presumably one per day – and think about how to present them together as one work. That instruction shifted to creating these daily works as sketches and then selecting 2 or 3 to further refine.
I committed to the idea of creating a series of tiny mandalas or meditations. I planned to present them together by merging them into one interactive sculpture that would feature each image as an individual vignette. I know it’s weird, but I collect toilet paper and paper towel cores, and my original idea was to make circular mandalas that we looked at through those tubes. But then I was watching Dr. Who and thought of how the TARDIS is “bigger on the inside,” so I got the idea to make kaleidoscopic infinity mirrors (note the one inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s Broad installation) in a square formation.
Usually a kaleidoscope is held up to a light source, but in considering how to connect the mandalas I came up with the idea of assembling them around a central light source. For that core structure, I considered various geometric shapes that could create enough uniform sides to display the requisite 10 Things, and discovered that a rhombicuboctahedron would give me 18 square panels to work with. Each would then have a mirror tube extending outward, creating a series of portals through which one could peek into the various expansive worlds.
The primary challenge I faced was how to create the mirrors. I was considering slicing up a mirror, but would need to be able to bias-cut the edges in order to create the kaleidoscopic effect. Front-silvered mirrors are very expensive and extremely delicate. I wanted plane mirrors, which are polished for precision so that they produce the most perfect reflections, but it became obvious that with the resources and timeframe available that would be difficult to get. Still, I wanted a highly reflective surface, and I was not sure that could be achieved with a mirror spray paint. I ended up ordering reflective mylar, which was only available in large rolls, so I expect to be incorporating this into my works for a while.
The next major challenge was creating and assembling the artwork. I would have liked to have used translucent vellum, but I already had marker paper, which is thinner but still translucent enough to diffuse light and designed to absorb ink. I found that in order to get a really saturated color when the artwork is lit from behind, I needed to draw on both the front and back sides of the paper. I could get different effects by only drawing on one side or the other.
I wanted to build the rhombicuboctahedron out of plastic and mount each each drawing on one of the panels, but I did not have a sheet of acetate to cut that out of (I tried cutting pieces from the lids of store-bought cookies, but it really needed to be cut out of a single piece for stability). In a sample piece, I reinforced the edges of the market paper with hot glue, but that distorted the light around the edges once it was illuminated. Instead, I relied on the tubes, glued to the drawings and structural elements, to create an exoskeleton for the paper core.
The tubes were cut from old cardstock boards left over from shipping comic books. They were trimmed down to 6″ lengths and scored to create four 2″-wide panels (to align with the 2″ x 2″ artworks), with a half-inch closure. Twelve were designed with connective flaps, but six had no edge pieces to connect to and required that I design additional support pieces.
The hollow paper core is about 5″ in diameter, and I wanted to place a small, battery-operated LED light inside. I was able to order a 4-bulb light kit from evandesigns.com, which I arranged around a piece of heavy-gauge wire so that it would not shake or shift as the piece is rotated. I also spliced in a set of four nano lights that appear inside the Kusama-inspired vignette, to give added depth to that piece.
This is the current state of the piece, with everything attached and lit up.
I am looking into options for creating an outer shell, so that it is like a globe with little light portals. Until then, I’m very happy with where this piece has taken me.