Freda Tschumy

Constructed of lightweight mahogany plywood Elbow III was part of the 1979 sculpture exhibition EQUILIBRIA at the Art and Culture Center in Hollywood, FL.

In an excerpt from her Artist Statement from the 1979 exhibition entitled EQUILIBRIA, Tschumy states, “The triangle is the most stable shape in nature, and the tetrahedron is the basic building block. There are only a few patterns possible in our three-dimensional space; nature uses them again and again to create the fantastic variety of shapes we see around us. These ideas fascinate me. I have taken just two basic shapes, the tetrahedron and the octahedron and tried to discover what can be done with such simple means…

It is the nature of these shapes to be quite flexible and unstable until the closing piece is put into place. Then the circuit of pressures and tensions is closed and they become rigid and stable by virtue of shape rather than material strength or solidity. Thus these pieces embody the equilibrium of physical forces as well as visual ones.”