Form Constants – Wendy Collin Sorin

Form Constants – Wendy Collin Sorin

Wendy Collin Sorin’s series of drawings Form Constants are process generated geometric tessellations recalling the patterns of woven textiles. The disjuncts and fractures within the interlocking lattices serve to create the illusion of warp and weft; their respective uneven tensile forces extending an impression of an undulating fabric surface.

‘ Each drawing begins with a grid of interlocking pentagons and substructures of triangles, chevrons, squares, Xs and diagonals. Drawn in freehand, the forms accumulate intuitively in a way that responds to influences of process, time, and life’

Existing between rule-like periodicity and randomness these woven drawings also allude to the interlaced screen, to pixels, and recall the dysfunctional patterns of recent glitch art and imperfect design. The glitch analogy doesn’t end there, for Wendy’s drawings are informed by her migraine auras – those geometric optical disturbances cause by corruption of the neural-optic system. The phrase ‘Form Constants’ was originally coined by the German-American psychologist Heinrich Kluver. It describes geometric patterns which are recurringly observed during hallucinations and altered states of consciousness. These geometric archetypes and entopic figures are posited to be the result of symmetry breaking dynamical systems and mechanisms in the primary visual cortex. An interesting paper [PDF] on the subject, What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us about the Visual Cortex, can be found here.