Matchstick Sculptures

Words

‘The matchstick sculptures are a meditation on emergent forms. Forms that occur naturally predicated upon simple rules, or building codes; in this case placing one matchstick next to another and allowing the fact that as the head is a slightly different width than the stick, a form will occur naturally.’

The visual artists and twin brothers Ryan and Trevor Oakes create sculptures made of thousands of matchsticks. The Colorado born New York based artists first form was a small grid of matchsticks which curved in two directions to become a portion of the surface of a sphere. After that, they set out on building an entire dome, starting with a ring of matches on a table surface upon which additional rings were stacked. The form didn’t quite want to emerge into a dome though unless a small amount of space was manually added between the match heads. Curiosity eventually caught them an they began to look for a form that would emerge if they didn’t manually space the heads and let the matches truly guide their own behavior. A sea-shell-like spiral unexpectedly emerged.

All images © Ryan and Trevor Oakes | Via: booooooom

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