Ruga Ribbons Installation

Rug Ribbons by Jiangmei Wu of Folded Light Art. Photography by Tony Vasquez

Ruga Ribbons is a 14 feet tall permanent sculpture commissioned by Rowland Design for Liberty Fund library that is located in Indianapolis. “Ruga” is the Latin word for making winkles, creases, pleats, and folds. Inspired by the use of winkling and folding in the material as a primary genesis of artistic forms, Ruga Ribbons is a digitally-precise form created from flat sheets of corrugated plastic material that mimics fabric-like ribbons. Suspended in the void of the main stairwell, Ruga Ribbons creates an ever-changing visual experience for people who come to interact with it as they move up and down the staircase.

Rug Ribbons by Jiangmei Wu of Folded Light Art. Photography by Tony Vasquez

The building architecture and art displayed in the building, which was designed by Rowland Design, provided the initial inspiration for Folded Light Art’s use of abstract geometry. Folded Light Art then worked with Ignition Art, a fabricator and installer, on solving issues associated with unrolling a couple of hundred unique panels for digital cutting and assembly. These unique panels were then connected in order to create the two ribbons that are intertwined with one another.

Rug Ribbons by Jiangmei Wu of Folded Light Art. Photography by Tony Vasquez

Ruga Ribbons installation

Ruga Ribbon installation

 

Stop-motion movie of Ruga Ribbons installation

See the above for a stop-motion movie, showing the installation-in-progress a wonderful crew from Ignition Arts, a designer/fabricator based in Indianapolis.

Weaving Thick Miura surface

Weaving thick Miura surface

The doubly periodic Miura pattern was named after Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura, and is a well-known origami pattern for its rigid and flat foldabilities and its ability to deploy and retract in a restrictive way. Miura pattern is also known as rigid origami, which is concerned with folding structures using flat rigid sheet material with certain thicknesses, such as metal, wood, plastic, etc, that are joined by hinges. Rigid origami has also studied as Thick origami by Tomohiro Tachi. In this article, he proposed using a new method called Tapered Panels in addition to Hoberman’s symmetric Miura-ori vertex method and Trautz and Kunstler’s Slidable Hinges method. Recently, Tomohiro Tachi and Tom Hull presented Double-line rigid origami as an extension of the crease offset method of thick rigid origami.

Interestingly, Miura surface can also be understood as a generalized example of bi-foldable infinite polyhedral complexes, or zonohedra, that are bounded by parallelograms. Similar to the weaving of a cube or other zonohera that has been studied by artist Rinus Roelofs, a polyhedron weaving technique can be used to construct these polyhedral complexes. A Miura surface can therefore be woven by strips of paper (see a diagram below), or thick materials such as corrugated cardboard. More images below show the added thickness and the stylization to the woven Miura surface in 4 mm thick corrugated cardboard. It was interesting to learn that weaving Miura surface with thick and rigid panels is a lot easier than adding thickness to the Miura origami panels.

A diagram showing weaving of Miura surface using the concept of zonohedra proposed by H.S.M. Coxeter

(a), (b) & (c) weaving Miura surface using corrugated cardboard. (d) & (e) using plastic board.