Loopy

George W. Hart

This is Loopy. Painted aluminum, it is almost 6 feet in diameter and stands 8 feet tall on the steel base.

Loopy is constructed of 30 loops, each 10 feel long if unrolled, which are woven through each other and bolted together. The five colors are carefully arranged so that

each loop crosses one loop of the other four colors,
each color appears once around each 5-sided opening, and
the ends of each loop approach the ends of two other loops of the same color.

It is shown above at the 1999 Mather Hospital Annual Outdoor Sculpture Show, Port Jefferson, NY. Currently it is in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the Steinway Gallery.

For this piece, I began with a colored pencil sketch. Above is my first concept-drawing for the sculpture. I then made a paper model (below, left) so I could see it from different angles. (It got a bit squished before I got around to taking this picture.) Finally, I made a 13" metal model (below, right) so I could practice the interweaving and bolting sequence on a small scale. The final design doesn't differ much from the original sketch. The main difference is that I made the strips slightly wider to give it a little more body.

You can read more about it in this paper, which appeared in the journal Humanistics Mathematics.