Kerfed Wood Sculpture

In my final year at Wesleyan University, I took a course in digital fabrication taught by Elijah Huges. In this course, I was inspired by sound design and sinusoidal forms to create a modular sculpture. By laser cutting plywood with patterns of holes (a process known as “kerf cutting”), the wood becomes much more flexible and can be molded into curved shapes. The sculpture’s individual modules retained their curvature through tension via tied strings as well as glue lamination. I then stacked together multiple modules to create larger forms.

In this project, I aimed to materialize the abstract concept of sound into a physical object that references sound design in multiple ways: through the tension in the strings, the curvature of the individual modules, and the sinusoidal shapes of the laser cuts.