Bradford Hansen Smith

Email: wholemovement@sbcglobal.net
Website: http://www.wholemovement.com/

My earliest Los Angeles memory is playing in dirt, making things with sticks, rocks and grass, later drawing and painting, making pictures of things. I tried replicating the nature of what I saw. Modeling my observations were my first attempts towards understanding the universe.

I attended Cooper Union in NY for a year and the School of the Chicago Art Institute for two years. I did not get degreed but did receive a fellowship taking me to Florence Italy for a year, long enough to learn about casting bronze and to get a good look at what was familiar through years of looking at pictures.

In the San Francisco Bay area I built a bronze-casting foundry, moved to Santa Fe, NM and for twenty years cast my own sculpture. Being a member of The Institute for Regional Education, a non-profit organization in Santa Fe, I participated in the production of KOYAANISQATSI, a feature length film exploring “life out of balance,” at the same time developing a sculpture project around the issues of man and technology.

With a desire to find out more about pattern formation, my life took another turn and I found inspiration in the work of R. Buckminster Fuller. I continued to look more comprehensively at transformational patterns of movement, how and why things worked. After receiving three US patents for developing a new classification of a geometric transformational movement system, I bottomed out of the business world. Then seeing the unexplored richness of the nature of the circle, after so many years of only drawing pictures of circles, I began to fold the circle.

Interview

Bradford Hansen Smith’s ArtStyle Blog interview by Amy Rudberg was published in April, 2008.

Artist’s Statement

Everything we know about pattern formation in nature is reflected in our math, the arts, and all the sciences, and is inherent in spherical Wholeness. The compressed sphere reforms to a circle disc in space. Unity of the Whole is not lost, simply reformed taking on orientation, revealing principles and information about spatial arrangements, and the structural organizing of things in space. For the last eighteen years I have been exploring the folding movements of the circle and joining them in multiple ways, and continuing to model towards understanding this universe. Folding circles has given me entrance to the mathematics education field with opportunities to work globally with students, teachers, and parents. I make available what I discover through writing books about folding circles, which I call Wholemovement: the movement of the whole to itself. As I continue to explore, it feels like only surface modeling of deeply compressed information. Truth in formation, the beauty of formation, and the benefit from structural reformation are inherent in the unified movement of the circle.

These pictures (in the gallery) represent a sampling of models that were done more for the information in process than for the art, which is always there. I use mostly 9-inch paper plates; they have not been cut or measured to make these models. The information is revealed fold-by-fold; the designing is a direct result of the information generated through proportional folding of circles.

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