Kinetic sculptures by Haruki Nakamura

Look at the photo a heart sculpture above, which is consists of closely interconnected gears. Although it seems that gears cannot move it is not. All of them can rotate around their respective centers, which your can see on a video below. Moving of gears are shown approximately on 50th second of the video but it's 

This kind of sculptures are called kinetic because all parts of them can move. It was created by Japanese engineer Haruki Nakamura and represented in 2005 with title Gear's Heart. Unfortunately, there's no any more information about him in the Internet except several images of his sculptures and few videos.

Also he created similar sculpture of cube, which you can see below.

Fibonacci spiral in nature

Fibonacci spiral is a line, which is created by drawing arcs connecting the oppposite corners of the squares in Fibonacci tiling, which is constructed of squares whose sides are successive Fibonacci numbers in length.

Fibonacci tiling

Fibonacci spiral

Fibonacci spiral exists in many objects of wildlife. It's one ob the basic curve, which you can see in small shells of nautilus and even in spirals of galaxies.

Arrangement of seeds in sunflower is an example of Fibonacci spiral among plants.

Hurricane is one of the most destructive power on Earth.

You can see Fibonacci spiral even in shapes of galaxies.

Although Nautilus shell looks very similar to Fibinacci spiral, it does not. Ivars Peterson in his article Sea Shell Spirals proved this fact. Nevertheless, Nautilus shell is one of examples of fractals in nature.

Fibonacci spiral inspired some artist to use it in their artworks. Below you can see an artwork by Petar Milivojevic named Gaia's gift.

Fractal tilings

Fractal shapes can be used as tiles for filling plane. In most cases variations of the Koch snowlake are used. A simple Koch snowflake is represented to the right. To create a set of tiles, which can be used for filling whole plane, we need another variations of the snowlake which exactly match to all convexes and concaves of the first figure.

Two variations of such kind of tilings were represented on Briges 2008 conference, which took place in Leeuwarden (Holland). Both were realized in wood. We see that several kinds of fractal tiles were used in both cases. 

Koch tiling by Edmund Harris

Pentagonal Koch tiling by Chaim Goodman-Strauss

Images were found in Briges 2008 - Leeuwarden pool at Flickr.

More mathematical issues about fractal tiles you can read in the article about Rauzy fractal.

Abstract creations by Vladimir Bulatov

Vladimir Bulatov creates very complex and wonderful abstract bronze sculptures. Shapes of sculptures are based on Platonic solids, but they represent another view on these classic polyhedrons. All figures were designed using classical ideas of balance and symmetry. These abstract forms express geometric aesthetic and beauty of shapes.

The photo above shows five interconnected tetrahedrons, so they are look like a single complex closed shape. Other figures by Vladimir Bulatov are based on single Platonic shape, e.g. dodecahedron or icosahedron. or more complex Archimedian solid.

Dodecahedron IX (Small Stellated Dodecahedron)

Dodecahedron VII (Great Dodecahedron)

Dodecahedron VII (Great Dodecahedron)

Rhombic Triacontahedron IV

Visit his site http://bulatov.org to see more wonderful sculptures or, maybe, to buy them.

Tessellations of David Bailey

M.C. Escher was the first, who used figures of birds, fishes, lizards and other animals for artistic regular plane division. Many followers then created numerous tessellation images.

One of them is artist from England David Bailey. He creates his images in pen and watercolour.

The main motifs of his tessellations are birds.


The more complex constructions come in, when two distinct motifs are used in conjunction with each other.



Besides usual animals David Bailey uses imaginary creatures to create his wonderful artworks. Below you can see dinosaur-like creatures. The main distinguishing feature of this drawing is that only part of the image was used for animals, when other space shows only borders of elementary tiles. It helps to better understand, which kind of symmetry was used in every case.

Also he created several artworks, which reminds Escher's artworks with mutable tessellations like Metamorphoses. The image below shows the same process as in Escher's lithograph Development I. But David Bailey used birds as motif for his artwork instead of Escher's lizards.

The reverse process is shown in the image below.
More images by David Bailey you see at his personal site http://www.tess-elation.co.uk/. Besides this you you read some articles about tessellation art and Escher's artworks.