During her residency, exhibiting artist Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels worked with the 2019 ARTery Artist cohort to create the tessellating geometric structure in the Social STUDIO (formerly called The ARTery) shown in the photo above. A tessellation is when a surface or space is covered with repeating geometric shapes. These shapes fit tightly together so that there are no gaps. For her structure, Fels uses a triangle as her tessellating shape.
Fels drew up the plans and did the math to create the base of the structure, while the members of the cohort needed to do no math to assist in the construction process of the triangles. The cohort started by making mini triangles using wooden coffee stir sticks. Making the mini triangles taught the cohort about the building process on a small scale. After each member created a triangle from the sticks and understood the process, they transitioned to collaboratively constructing the larger triangles. The video below was created by Fels showing the process of how the triangles were built.
What you will need
Hot glue or a quick-drying glue and wooden coffee stir sticks (these work the best, but you can get inventive and try materials like popsicle sticks, sticks from your back yard, or thin slices of wood).
To create your own no-math triangle, start by assembling the base. Arrange three sticks into a triangle shape. Glue the three points where the sticks touch. As you build the layers up, move the sticks slightly inwards to create a pyramid shape. Add glue to the corners as you go along. You can cut the sticks so that they become smaller as you go up, or you can leave them long.