ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bobby Jaber, a porcelain artist with a BS in the Sciences and a Masters of Fine Arts, has been a high school chemistry and physics teacher for more than 25 years. In his evolving Octahedral Porcelain Process, Jaber effortlessly combines elements from both the sciences and the arts. Seven years in its evolution, this approach to sculpting spherical porcelain vessels focuses on combining the exactitude of measurement, the mathematics of the sphere and exercises in geometry with the unique aesthetics of embedded design.
Jaber's art draws its inspiration from his Arabic heritage. His works bring together in three dimensions the same symmetrical elements that define the beautiful works of Islamic sacred art. Historically, Islamic artists mastered the application of mathematics to patterned tilings because their work could contain no graven images. These interlaced designs embody an unbroken rhythm, regularity and interwovenness that only such abstract forms can convey. Jaber's finished vessels introduce curvature to the embedded designs, at once both natural and abstract, bringing a new dimension to the geometric art experience. Jaber's designs, however, unlike traditional Islamic design, also combine both chaos and order in a symmetrically unified "whole."
Jaber's approach to design in porcelain also draws from the works of other artist/scientists in history, most notably Buckminster Fuller, who explored the energetic geometry of the sphere in his "synergetic geometry" and was best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome. As he began to bring Bucky's approach from synergetics into his efforts to divide the sphere, define the planes of truncation of polyhedra to form modules and to recombine the modules into new forms, the more beautiful and harmonious the resulting designs have become. The embedded geometric design patterns of these unique porcelain vessels embody many of Fuller's elaborations of synergetics, a geometric system based on his attempts to understand "Nature's Design."
"Jaber in His Art-Lab"