Self-Avoiding Walk

Self-Avoiding Walk is a playful response to the conundrum, “how to make an artwork without making decisions about composition, colour and line?” Pass those decisions on to others. With non-collaborative collaborators, ideas, not people, become the decision makers. I would like to thank my three silent collaborators and, at the same time, acknowledge that they played no part in the process. Composition: Thank you Rocchini and Life of Riley (Wikimedia Commons) for your mathematical diagram of a self-avoiding walk. A self-avoiding walk makes an ideal structure for a self-avoiding artwork. Colour: Should the artwork be monochrome, like the diagram, or in colour and, if in colour, what colours and in what order? Thank you Pi for making all of those decisions. Pi’s numerical sequence leads the way along the walk, each digit represented by a specific colour. Line: How to fix it all together? My final thank you goes to fashion designer Julien Macdonald for enthusing about bugle beads, on the TV programme, “Strictly, It Takes Two”, and thus providing the last piece of the puzzle. Materials: brass curtain rings, silk thread, bugle beads, graphite rod, monofilament illusion cord Techniques: Dorset button making, wrapping, threading