On Friday July 12, 2013, the Center for Islamic Studies Visiting Scholar, Carol Bier, presented her Islamic art workshop entitled, "Geometry and Islamic Art: Explorations of Number, Shape, and the Nature of Space" at the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS) UGM Graduate School in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Through a brief illustrated introduction and hands-on exercises, the workshop provided participants with an opportunity to explore the aspects of Islamic art and architecture that rely on the relationships between numbers, shapes, and the nature of space (i.e. the spacial dimension). The course explored the four basic symmetries operations and considered the patterns that cover the plane in relation to radial symmetries, line symmetries (border patterns; friezies) and plane symmetries (field patterns; wallpapers). Participants examined how these principals find visual expression in Islamic art and architectural ornament.
Bier is an historian of Islamic art, completing her third year as Visiting Scholar with the Center for Islamic Studies. Her research focuses on the study of pattern as intersections of art and mathematics. She also serves as a Research Associate with The Textile Museum in Washington, DC. where she served as Curator for Eastern Hemisphere Collections from 1984 to 2001. She was President of the Textile Society of America from 2006 to 2008, and continues to publish in fields of Islamic textile history, relating design, pattern and weave structure to craft and technology.
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