Personally I just love it when the strict rules of math and geometry fuse with the subjective world of art and mysticism. No tool can help these two worlds — so different — to collide and mix with each other more proficiently than 3D printing. Frank Chester is a Californian artist, geometrician and teacher who knows this very well. So well, in fact, that he intends to use 3D printing to bring one of his greatest creative achievements to the public, by producing a line of geometrical jewellery that goes right to the heart of everything.
In 2000 he discovered and named the Chestahedron, a beautiful heptahedron (if you like complex solids and most people in the 3D printing world do), a seven-sided geometrical figure which, as he later found out, represents the inner and outer geometry of the human heart. Thus the name of the shape is less about the artist’s name and more about what it represents — the human chest. That may be a bit complex to envision but this video might help.
Chester and his New Form Technologies team have launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $20,000 that will go toward the production of the New Form Collection through professional 3D printing technologies, development of a digitized catalogue and global launch of the collection to bring the Chestahedron and an awareness of Chester’s work to as many people as possible.
Possible contributions range from $35 for a 2” aluminde desktop Chestahedron to $5999 for a 12” of a Venus Sculpture (that evolves from a hidden movement inside the “first asymmetrical inversion” of the Chestahedron”), and includes many different options and models in between.
The main argument to support the campaign is that the Chestahedron’s shape and understanding go beyond its aesthetic beauty and that jewellery is a mean to carry a deeper understanding of the relationship between form and our inner selves.
The biggest achievement for the NFT team will be to teach about this interesting and fascinating (as many solids are) geometrical figure, which Chester first drew, flattened, by using two circles whose size ratio is equal to the Golden Mean, a fixed ratio that artists and scientists have found to govern many natural generative objects, such as leaves or even the yuma body.
The Chestahedron sits perfectly inside a cube at a 36° angle, which is exactly the same angle at which the human heart sits inside the chest. Apparently it also has implications that go even beyond humans and can help scientists understand more about the shape and evolution of our planet Earth.
If you want to know more you can find some interesting and well documented information on this Gaia inspired website. I will just limit my observations to the fact that, if someone was to find a geometrical shape that perfectly fits inside the chest (of both humans and the Earth), it just had to be someone named Chester.
