Fibonacci+5

Date: 1996
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/1996/1996.28_1a.jpg&max=460 width="297" height="232" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=35186"]] || Title: **Fibonacci 5**

Artist: **Billie Ruth Sudduth** Born: Sewanee, Tennessee 1945

Medium: reed splints Dimensions: 13 x 16 1/2 in. (33.0 x 41.9 cm) diam. Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Kay Sekimachi and Bob Stocksdale and Susan Stewart

Accession: 1996.28 || "The ratios I use for my overs and unders . . . are the same ones found in the spacing of the spirals on seashells, pineapples, in the arrangements of a daisy or sunflower, even in the spirals that form the curve of an elephant's tusk. Best of all, Fibonacci goes to infinity, so I'm good for at least another century." Artist quoted in //The Crafts Report//, June 2002
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Billie Ruth Sudduth avoided studying math during college and also stayed away from art classes, preferring to play sports. Once she began weaving her baskets she saw the connection that her patterns had with Fibonacci's ratios, a sequence of naturally occurring proportions discovered in the thirteenth century by Leonardo Fibonacci. This in turn led the artist to look elsewhere in nature for her models. To achieve the black color of the reeds in this basket, the artist immersed them in a homemade dye produced by soaking rusty nails in water for over a month.
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Artist Biography SAAM Collections Page
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