Bees, and Spheres, Minerals and Becoming Crabs

There's so much science art being shared on Twitter this month for #SciArtSeptember. I have scheduled works for daily prompts for the whole month. I have also just finished working my way through the entire list of prompts for #mathyear - as well as  continuing ongoing bee-themed projects.

There was no summer camp for the last weeks of August and beginning of September before school, so I was pretty busy parenting, but here are some new works from the end of August and September so far.

The Leafcutter Bees, linocut and leaf prints by Ele Willoughby, 2021

 

I made a series of monoprints about leafcutter bees, and whimsically, in collaboration with leafcutter bees! These small, but multifarious native bees are important pollinators, who make nests for their babies using small telltale half-moon pieces they cut from leaves and petals. This work features two large linocuts of two leaf cutter bees: Megachile relativa and Megachile brevis. These linocuts are made on collaged Japanese washi papers and cellophane to capture the colours in their bodies and wings. Each print has its own array of leaf and petal prints from leaves and petals used by leaf cutter bees from my garden. The plants used include raspberries, roses (leaves and petals), lily of the valley, lilac, lemon balm, ash, thicket creeper, round-leaved Crane's bill and more. Each print is 17" tall by 12.5" wide (43.2 cm by 31.8 cm). 

Sphere Packing, linocut with collaged washi by Ele Willoughby, 2021

 

I have an ongoing thread of my #mathyear art on Twitter, and I was looking ahead at future prompts. I added a several portraits and other prints about math to fill out the remaining prompts, including this new item in my shop: a block print shows the two piles with the two possible close packing of equal spheres, each below a diagram of the plan view of the layout: Face-centered cubic (fcc) and hexagonal close packed (hcp). Each pile of spheres on water-colour paper with a deckle edge has its own unique assortment of collaged gorgeous Japanese washi papers. Each version of this print is unique.

The problem of how efficiently you can pack spheres into a volume has a long history in mathematics. It was Carl Friedrich Gauss who found the highest average density that can be achieved by lattice packing and the Kepler conjecture (as in Johannes Kepler) states that this is the highest density that can be achieved by any arrangement of spheres, either regular or irregular. When the famous mathematician David Hilbert set his 23 Problems of important unsolved problems in math in 1900, it included the question of what is the densest sphere packing. The question is generally considered solved since T.C. Hales proved the Kepler conjecture in 1998.

Though this may seem an abstract theoretical geometry problem there are real-life applications. It turns out, for instance, that many crystals with structures based on close-packed identical spheres of the fcc or hcp variety. 

 

Malachite, linocut, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2021

There's also the annual social media battle of the minerals going on with #MINCUP2021. I always intended to make a series of mineral prints but never got passed making Quartz. I have managed to tie several of the minerals to existing prints and been tweeting those along with my votes, but I have managed to make one new pertinent print so far: Malachite. I have been using "cool physics and/or art applications" to determine my vote so malachite, often carved to make beautiful items, and a paint pigment since antiquity was obviously one to support. 

Jennifer Zee (ginkgozee on instagram and here on Etsy) has been working on an amazing series of mineral relief prints (including malachite and many others recently) and it reminded me I really wanted to have a whole colleciton. You should check out her work!

 

Porcelain crab, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2021

For the #SciArtSeptember prompt evolving, I knew I had to talk about how things keep evolving into crabs! This is a hand-printed lino block print in black and red ink on white Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper of a porcelain crab, Neopetrolisthes maculatus. Each print is 8” by 8” and printed by hand. Porcelain crabs are decapod crustaceans in the family Porcellanidae, which resemble true crabs but are in fact closer related to squat lobsters. They have flattened bodies as an adaptation for living in rock crevices. They first appeared in the Tithonian age of the Late Jurassic epoch, 145-152 million years ago. There are one of at least 5 groups of decapod crustaceans which have evolved to be more crab-shaped in a process known as carsinisation.