Eternity

HEIGHT 5FT (1.5m) POLISHED BRONZE 1980

"The Sum of the Sums is Eternity"
*Summarum Summa est Aeternum

This sculpture was created in the first year of my Symbolic Sculpture adventure. It followed Dependent Beings, which depicted the union of man and woman as being the corner stone of our Civilization. That union lasts but a brief moment, but is made possible by the union of our parents, and will lead to future unions by our children when they are grown, so is a part of a continuous whole. I needed to change the two-sided image of Dependent Beings into a one-sided continuum to symbolise Eternity, a continuous whole.

I prepared 100 equilateral triangles each with a hole in the middle, and threaded them onto a ring (the actual making of Eternity is illustrated in three photographs, and disscussed from its mathematical perspective in Fibre Bundles ). This gave me three bands. By changing one of the edges to meet another, I found I was left with only one edge, and one band (this is looked at in Mobius Band in the Mathematics section ). It was a magical moment when I realized that I had created Eternity.

I am now told that if I had slightly curved the sides of the triangles, I would have made a model of the Umbilic Bracelet, a space which occurs in the area of mathematics called Singularity Theory.

* LUCRETIUS... De Rerum Natura
Lucretius: full name Titus Lucretius Carus 96-55BC Roman Poet and Philosopher. In his didactic poem `De rerum natura' he expounds Epicauris atomist theory of the universe.

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