Yarn Theory!

I haven't posted in a while, partly because I've been travelling, but mostly because I've been in the throes of curating a show about knitted and crocheted sculpture!
Yarn Theory opens WAY too soon- April 25th- and features some really exciting work being done by artists, mathematicians and scientists. In addition to the exhibit, there are also a number of workshops, a performance and a guerrilla knitting project taking place on the buildings exterior!
we are blogging about the whole kit-and-caboodle here:

http://ps122gallery.wordpress.com/

So what am I making for this show?
I am trying to make a knitted version of Johannes Kepler's model of the solar system. He was very interested in platonic solids( hey, me too!), and attributed quasi-mystical characteristics to them. He also thought they showed the structure of the universe in some way. His model has them nesting inside each other to show the organizational perfection of our solar system's makeup.

His ORDER for nesting the shapes is eccentric- instead of starting with the shapes with the fewest faces and working outwards, or some other equally intuitive logic, they are arranged in a manner hard to suss indeed. This makes my job more complex than I initially thought.

Even more weird was his idea that the finished, bronze model would also double as a nice punchbowl- intriguing and strange. Was he really into parties?
Perhaps it was the expense to some patron to cast the model that sent him fishing for possible other (festive!) "uses" for the thing?

Anyway, after some amusing false starts I have developed a system for making my forms which "works". It invoves elastic and drinking straws as well as the glittering quick-silver yarn I bought in Venice. I knit around the straw- a bit like a knitting Jenny or, as they call it in the Uk, "French" knitting, where you use a spool with nails in it to make mostly useless knit tubes. In my case I NEED knit tubes, which has sent me on a variety of scavenger hunts throughout New Haven and NYC looking for straws of the correct circumferences.