.MGX Design products

About Quin

This sculpture marks the end of a series that has spanned Bathsheba Grossman’s sculptural life to date, beginning with the four-sided tetrahedron and progressing through the five Platonic solids to the last and most mystical of them, the twelve-sided dodecahedron. In the first four shapes Plato saw the elements that make up the material world, but in this fifth he saw the nature and wholeness of the entire universe, the spiritual quintessence. This light-sculpture is a household embodiment of that unity: the Quintrino. Onto the basic form of the dodecahedron – for those who enjoy games with exotic dice, it is a 12-sided die – The designer has sculpted a topology that plays at every point with the transition between inner and outer space. The eye is led into the sculpture along many swooping paths, leading from triangles to pentagons and back again.
The lamplight also follows those paths. The light, white material is itself translucent, and here it’s made more translucent by a myriad of perforations. But in a more global way, the geometric facets of the original solid are unloosed from each other, and are now free to rotate in space, opening out their boundaries into curves that fl y past each other. This lets the turning surfaces override each other interestingly, like waves on water, while keeping the sculpture open into space in all directions. But what is most beautiful about Quintrino is the anti-light, the way the surfaces shadow each other. It creates a continuum of differently shaded areas casting smooth gradations of light in a spherical matrix that is punctuated by small pure beams. Mathematically, this object adds complexity to the original dodecahedron by bringing in a rotation, so that the object becomes different from its mirror reflection. It’s a symmetry that is rarely seen; in fact you might be unable to point to another example of any man-made or natural object which has it. This sculpture is like a seedpod or flower in some other world, where the formal, static symmetry of reflection has a looser grip than this one.
The QUIN.MGX design embodies the fifth and final platonic solid in which Plato saw the nature and wholeness of the entire universe, the spiritual quintessence.

Technical Sheet [.PDF - 1Mb]