Artist: Helaman Ferguson

                          

At this moment I see my creative process in two parts: a mental part and a physical part. It is important to me that the parts are hard to separate. The mental part is based on mathematics---its ideas, symbols and equations are an essential part of my personal design language.

Eight Fold Way (sculpture, Univ. of California, Berkeley)

Eight Fold Way (sculpture, Univ. of California, Berkeley)

Much of my sculptural body of work celebrates the remarkable achievements of mathematics as an abstract art form---a human activity spanning thousands of years. The physical part is based on my aesthetic choice of raw materials, which tends to be stone from geological activity spanning millions of years.

I use many different kinds of specialized tools, including computers, virtual image projection from equations, tool positioning and orientation monitoring systems, air hammers and drills, carbide cutters, diamond corers and saws, diamond chains, cables, pulleys, hydraulic rams, gantry cranes.

Aperiodic Pentrose Torus, Alpha (sculpture, Smith College, Northampton, MA)

Four Canoes: Two Linking Klein Bottles with Hexagon Klein Bottle Plaza (sculpture, St. Paul, MN, 1997)

I work in a high-risk environment of air, electricity, water, dust and chips, which calls for special breathing apparatus, vision and hearing protection, various kinds of body armor and insulation.

I use hammer and chisel, too, and while a lot has changed, what I do is much the same as when our ancestors banged a soft rock with a hard rock and made a magical form. My mathematical forms arrive by a subtractive process: my computer-tool position and orientation-monitoring system does not do the cutting work; I do.

Eight Fold Way and Circle Limit 7 (sculpture, Univ. of California, Berkeley)

Umbilic Torus NC (sculpture, Syracuse Univ., New York)

The system gives me quantitative information. Learning from computed quantitative information is like learning a piece of music or choreographic sequence by heart: once I have learned a new form, it becomes part of my sculptural repertoire, independent of the computer system.

Helaman Ferguson was selected to be the SIGGRAPH'99 Keynote Speaker, similar to lectures he has given all over the world, he will discuss his mathematical sculpture with slides, video, stone, and bronze. Such lectures are frequently a precursor of a permanent installation of his sculpture at the institution site of the lecture.

Helaman Ferguson was recently commissioned to do sculpture for the Annual Mathematics Award given by the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The first award and sculpture was given to Andrew Wiles on May 10th, 1999, at the Massachusets Institute of Technology, for his proof of the three century old Fermat's Last Theorem.

Richard Waller, Museum Director, University of Richmond, writes "Helaman Ferguson is both artist and mathematician. The art historian Herbert Read saw the mathematician as an abstract artist "except that he does not possess, or has not cultivated, the ability to express his conceptions in a plastic material." Ferguson is exactly that abstract artist who fully possesses and has cultivated his ability to express his mathematical conceptions as sculpture. He has discovered the common ground of mathematics and art upon which he has placed his own creativity."

        
       | Homage to Escher |
                                       
                                  | gallery entrance |

                            | past exhibitions |

                                           | Leonardo On-Line |