Platonic Solids

For the platonic solids project, I immediately knew that I wanted to make something reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. The challenge after I decided to make a mobile, however, was in figuring out what to place where. To start the project, I created the five platonic solids each with colored paper to represent the element that they symbolize (i.e. tetrahedron/fire/red, icosahedron/water/blue, hexahedron/earth/green, etc.). From there, I had to decide on the different heights to hang them at. To do this, I looked into which chakra each platonic solid represents, and hung them in order from Root Chakra to Heart Chakra (i.e. hexahedron/root/bottom, octahedron/heart/second to top, dodecahedron/third eye, crown, higher crown, etc.). However, I still needed to figure out where to place the dodecahedron, being the last one, in relation to the other solids on the mobile. Eventually, I ended up placing it in the middle, due to the fact that it represents the Universe, encompassing all and at the very middle of everything.

This piece was particularly fun for me because, although challenging, I have always been interested in the platonic solids. Being able to make each one by hand and then figure out how to hang them really helped me form a deeper understanding of the shapes and their meanings.

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