“Spherical Approximations”
Melanie Irwin
10 July → 15 Aug 2015

Spherical Approximations expands on Melanie Irwin’s Geodesic Envelopes project (2013, ongoing), which examines the human construction and habitation of geometric space. Performers use salvaged objects to build makeshift spherical structures inside the textile membranes that envelop their bodies.

Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes are reconfigured here as stretchy patchwork bubbles; shifting, expanding biomorphs that ingest the objects from their surroundings. The work also makes reference to Archimedes’ approximation of ? (pi), where straight-sided polygons provide rigid parameters for the indefinite dimensions of the circle.