A quarterly challenge in the sculptural wet felting group, online, was to create a Two holed Scherck minimal surface in felt.

In mathematics, a minimal surface described as:  A surface that locally minimizes its area. If you want to know more, and see some of the other minimal surfaces, go to your search engine and type it in.

This challenge tugged at my love for geometry, and I set about working out how it could be done.

After some drawing and a try out in kitchen paper, held together with pins, I set about creating the resist, that I hoped would do what I thought it would.

And my first minimal surface sculpture, was born.

I did some stitching with a fine white silk thread, that further enhanced the geometrical shape

My curiosity was peeked, and my brain started asking question as to what would happen if I did this with template or that with the template.

It requires a bit of mind bending and back and forwards thinking to take a flat 2-dimensional template or drawing and make it into a 3-dimensional sculpture.

As flexible as kitchen towel is, it has its limits, and it does rip when you stick needles in it to many times. I tried with small pieces of sticky tape, but that wasn’t much better. So, more drawing was made and then I just had to try the ideas out with a new template.

As the ideas grew, so did the size and complexity of the sculptures. I experimented with cutting bits out , colours, adding material and other fibers.

The same template as the black but with bits cut out.

Here parts of the template has been enlarged.

The same template as the blue one, but with cut outs added.

The same template as the blue sculpture, but now with coloured silk fabric added.

A step up from the previous blue sculpture, with more alterations to the template.