Hello, from the edges of time.

I’m just finishing up my huge project of over a decade, the lovely Contemporary Geometric Beadwork explorations. Our team will have a couple of new books out soon, and I’ll be back to a bit more of a communicative life after that.

MIT invited us back to this January term to talk about our project and show our new work, and you are gleefully invited to join us – we are doing a couple of lectures and holding two weeks of open studio sessions for the MIT campus on making hyperbolic art in beadwork and paper.

Please stop in if you are in the Boston area! Our goal is to engage ever more curious people in the arts, sciences and engineering to take a deeper look at what simple models can teach about geometry, the Universe and the architecture of the world around us.

So if you come visit our classroom, please be sure to overlap with any of the MIT community present, and if you know anyone on campus who might enjoy our work, send them our way.

Feel free to forward, post, or print our poster!

PDF versions: cgb at mit iap 2019 poster

Good morning from a cool and rainy Boston.

It’s been some time since I wrote (to anyone) but I feel the sap rising and this is good news, because it means that the energy that has been moving through me is ready to test new words, to try them on like glittering clothing.

Ideas are spilling forward motion in all directions to wake my heart, to disrupt the laziness of the old ways and old words I hear around me.

High-energy impacts and coincidences have filled my past year. Next week will be three months since I was hit hard by a car while walking, and next month will mark the one-year anniversary of being interrogated as a spy by some toughs from the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works.

Both were difficult and neither were reasonable, but I’m stronger now and that’s not nothing. I can see each now for the gifts they were, for the holes that they punched in my own reality, for the clarity with which I can now see the physics of love, and the need for kindness, for the leaving behind of assumptions, for refusing to participate in expired processes.

The pressing vigor that has been opening old boxes in my attic is rearranging the story of my life. With each breath I take, a new springy web of energy appears to hold me.

I’ve slipped the bonds of my own time, woken new.

What will I say?

Even though I’ve been silent for these months, I love you and I have been thinking of you. And I will keep thinking of you until the wind takes me away, or perhaps even after it does.

. . .

Look for me at MIT this coming January; I’ll be teaching all month during the IAP session, and all are welcome at the lectures.

Check the main page of this site anytime for my schedule in general.

on my desk

Incredibly I am still immersed in the discovery-packed Contemporary Geometric Beadwork project, and we expect to finish three books this year  (including foreign translations, reissues of the first two volumes and an app). The project is ten years strong and growing, and we have seamlessly blended into new fields and worlds, visiting metamaterials labs, universities, mathematics conferences, scientific knitting studios, DARPA and the Naval Research Lab (don’t worry, we only work for peace). We have begun to publish in the academic literature, and by the end of the year should have completely updated our video, image and print libraries.

events / commitments 

Jan  2020:  MIT IAP Session, Cambridge, Mass
This year’s session was a complete success- the art team went in support of the science team, and many new collaborations were forged. We will do it again next year with both teams combined, pencil in Jan 11-15, 2021 if you would like to attend.

April 2020:  Release of the first new books of the CGB series:  The CGB Pattern Book and a photo compilation, CGB Vol III.

May 2020:   Visit to Cambridge University in England to give a talk and workshop for Jeremy Baumberg’s group at the NanoPhotonics Center and some of the extended art and science community, to Germany to meet with physicist Marcus Reid, and to Singapore to mount a beautiful exhibition at the ArtScience Museum. This exhibit is still in the planning stage, but we should have details soon.
(photo above by John Harper)

July 2020:   All month, the team will be gathering at our place in Washington DC for a CGB team meeting, including assembly of large museum exhibits for several upcoming shows. People will come in and out from July 6-20, and we will have public events and beading days. Stay tuned.

Sept 2020 – onward:   As we wrap the different stages of the publishing projects, the team will begin traveling the world to talk and teach, introducing the new ideas and techniques. Please email me directly  if your group would like us to visit, or if you would like to contribute to any of our communal sculptural pieces.

While I finish all of this work, I’m taking the gentle opportunity brought by a full desk to dive deep, so while you may not see me, I am working, and I am thinking of you. I will begin writing again when I have the bandwidth.