Brilliance + Fire
Brilliant Cut | Adam Boyd 2019
Photo by Alex Smee
While I have spent Christmas locked away in my air-conditioned office, attempting to hand forge every single word of my memoir manuscript, Adam has been out in the tropical heat, tucked under the art centre verandah with hundreds of thongs. He has sorted them in order of colour across a long work bench.
Adam discovered these castaways on the tide lines of local beaches, while collecting the bottles, combs and bags that annoyed him. If their plastic partners in ocean travel were any clue, the thongs have floated and bobbed from all around the Torres Strait, PNG and Indonesia. They are the sea weathered remnants of once brightly clad feet on the coasts of hot countries. They must be universally of little value since they are discarded in such huge volumes, although we have discovered that their propensity for travel is being put to good use. The word ‘love’ has been gauged out of one of the soles, and underlined, with a love heart, just to make sure we don’t miss the gesture.
Some weeks back, Adam started cutting the thongs into triangles with a Stanley knife. He stuck the shapes together with glue, like puzzles, creating colourful little flowers and stars. They started moving into the empty spaces around my office. The following weekend more puzzles appeared, made larger with new shapes. They were like growing crystals. And then Adam appeared at my door holding up a slab of symmetrically arranged diamonds and triangles, with a regular pattern of colours that reminded me of someone’s nanna, a rubberised patchwork quilt! I am surrounded now by all these creations and I can’t stop looking at them.
The exactness with which the puzzle pieces rest against each other is a miracle. The scratchings of the sun and salt, and the imprints of feet have rendered the thong behaviour unpredictable - some are hard and hold their form, others are spongy and porous and bulge when they’re sliced.
Recently, intricate diagrams and equations on scraps of paper appeared on the workbench, suggesting the project had evolved into something more complicated. Tiny cardboard triangles and long irregular petal shapes had been cut out of boxes and were being arranged inside a circle - a template for the next creation. A meticulous slicing of the thongs followed. It looked like torture, or at least, annoying. Even so, I was often drawn away from my computer to see what was going on out there.
What’s going on out here? Are you doing a new project?
Yes.
What are you listening to?
ABC Jazz radio. It’s very soothing.
What are you making?
I’m re-creating the geometry of a brilliant cut diamond.
Ooooooh! I might go and look that up. Would you like a cool drink?
Yes, please.
Some things I learnt:
A diamond’s appearance is the product of the light paths which are reflected off its facets. Before we started cutting facets into diamonds, they were dull and uninspiring, people preferred other precious stones. Then a young Belgian engineer, Marcel Tolkowsky, designed the Round Brilliant Cut - fifty-eight facets arranged on a tiny stone, with the exact geometric proportions to optimise the reflection of white light, or brilliance, and the dispersal of that light into rainbow colours, the fire.
At the age of twenty, Marcel had created a template for the perfect balance between brilliance and fire! He had uncovered the hidden beauty of diamonds.
I ran out to tell Adam about my discovery. While I declared this to be the most romantic feat of mathematics ever, Adam talked about the possibility that someone creating brilliance and fire may have had some wanderings through some sacred geometry, and that perhaps the feat was grounded in something more than just numbers. I did not have time to understand what he meant, so I went back inside to write about diamonds.
Meanwhile, Adam stayed at the table, continuing his sincere attempt to replicate that geometric perfection with the thongs.
Just to see where it will go, he said.
Of course, there had to be many design variations because he was working with rubber.
The sculpture was not a three-dimensional diamond, it was an imitation of the facet arrangement of the pavilion, or the bottom half of a diamond. So the angle of a real diamond’s facets and the patterns of reflected light were suggested instead, through the symmetry of his colour arrangement, of white, blue and yellow.
Because of the unwieldy building materials, perfect symmetry was impossible. The sculpture grew where it was inclined, so Adam had to adjust his cuts and arrangements to compensate, but not so much that it would disrupt the illusion of perfection.
Even with his persistent persuasion, the thongs resisted their new form. After the last remaining space in the circle was filled, two stray triangles remained on the table. But they no longer had a place to go, so he said it was done.
That’s like at IKEA, I said.
After all that effort, there was no fanfare. Adam scrubbed the thong diamond clean and handed it over. I photographed it, then sat it on my desk, alongside all the other thong art.
I couldn’t stop writing about it. That circle of feet, ocean voyages and landfill, squashed into a template for perfection. The geometry had definitely brought something new to the thongs. There was an underlying beauty there, I just had to keep writing and I would uncover it. I wrote about it for days, then a week. I swapped my book writing for a rabbit hole of articles on diamond cutting, geometry and the evolution of mathematical theory. I discussed my research in detail with Adam and then went searching through the thongs on the bench outside, looking for clues in their holes and grooves - all in the hope that the point of this extensive exploration would jump out at me and the story would reveal itself. Sometimes what I wrote felt like brilliance, but those times were always followed by the feeling that it was just dull, and then I would scold myself because I was not getting my book written.
This is not getting my book written. It’s not even good.
I dragged my distress and some coffees out to the verandah to discuss the problem with Adam. But he was busy scrubbing clean the next hundred or so thongs, lining them up in neat, coloured rows and inspecting them. It annoyed me that he was creating something new, while I had been sucked into a black hole with his last idea, reduced now to staring at a screen and making cakes.
What are you doing now?
I don’t know. Maybe a bowl. But there’s also maps and water, and colours of the seasons, landscapes… but I think the thongs will determine what happens next.
My story has no point. It’s stupid.
The thong rows were so clean and bright now. So beautiful! I could see the textures and colours that were inspiring him; the treetops, the mangroves, rocky ledges, sand, porcelain, reef. So exciting! My imagination started building things too; nothing solid, just the possibility of things. I worshipped Adam in that moment for his natural inclination to be led by that feeling, the promise of something, rather than the thing itself. And being true to the promise, he would cut and glue and shape until the thing revealed itself to him. There would be a new creation on my desk by the end of the day.
And I felt desperately that I needed to write words about that, and that I should let that feeling lead me too.
What’s wrong with your story?
It’s not about the thong diamond.
This was never a story about the thong diamond, as much as I love it. It is about all the things that made it happen, and that happened because of it.
This is a story about the process of creating; about engaging with the world and being curious. It’s about experimentation and patience, making time to imagine, and the will to bring something to life when you don’t even know what it is yet. And having the humility to keep practicing, knowing that the outcome might not be brilliant, so that one day, it will.
I spent another two days on the thong diamond story, rewriting it so it was this story. It’s not brilliant, but at least I know what it’s about now. And I sincerely enjoyed my time out there in diamond land. I learnt many things, about light refraction, sea currents, persistence, baking, and Adam.
I often think that I might be wasting my precious time, writing myself into these holes and then out again, about things that don’t matter to anyone but me, and none of it getting my book written. But I now have an office full of discarded footwear to remind me that this is all part of the process, that thong art makes me a better writer. And while brilliance feels a world away right now, the thongs give me fire.