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Title: Temari Quintuplets
Artist: Carolyn Yackel
Materials: Styrofoam balls, thread, pearl cotton
Technique: Embroidery/temari
Artist’s Statement: These temari balls form a subset of the union of two larger sets—one consisting
of fourteen balls exhibiting the symmetries of the sphere as enumerated in The Symmetries of Things
by Conway, Burgiel, and Goodman-Strauss, the other consisting of 16 balls exhibiting the Platonic solids
and the Archimedean solids. The teal spiral ball has Conway class 17 17. It has no symmetry exchanging
one pole for the other. The same is clearly true for the bud emerging from its brown sheath, which shows
elevenfold kaleidoscopic symmetry *11 11. The bright orange eye ball has Conway class *532, but is an
evocative example of an icosidodecahedron. Contrastingly, the flower garden is a traditional temari ball,
which beautifully exemplifies the usefulness of the Conway classification scheme. It is *432. Rectangles
has class 532, because once again we have chirality rather than a kaleidoscope.