For a week in 8th grade Math Club, I was stumped on a problem pertaining to the volume of a tetrahedron; having never seen the solid in real life, unlike cubes or spheres, I struggled to visualize it. My teacher encouraged me to build the solid out of toothpicks, which I did. Having a concretized shape before me allowed my physical eye to work in harmony with my abstract mind and solve the problem.
To this day, I distinctly remember the feeling of pure discovery having concretized a visual. This is what first got me interested in installation and building, physically creating something that exists only in my emotions and imagination.
In this experience installation, I linked skewers into self-stabilizing tetrahedral forms and submerged it. Swimming through it, I sought to duplicate the same feeling of exploration and navigating an unfamiliar landscape that creation and problem solving always bring me.
To build this structure, I adopted a modular technique, building a number of tetrahedron units before assembling them together, then removing extra skewers to clean up the structure.
I built the structure around a pool simply because it was the only space available to me, but observing how it interacted with the environment, from reflections to shadows, is what inspired me to submerge the entire structure.
It’s interesting how different the viewing experience is when underwater.