Ruth Tabancay has been interested in geometric forms since a young child when she puzzled over the tile patterns on her grandmother’s bathroom floor. In this exhibition, hexagonal patterns are the basis for 120°, a cast sugar installation, and Garden Variations, a hand- stitched tea bag quilt. While the hexagonal grid is a tessellation in the Euclidian plane, she found that hyperbolic (non-Euclidean) geometric forms could be represented with the medium of crochet. Hyperbolic Systems consists of several types of these structures. In a third representation of geometric-based pattern, she hand-stitched a set of works generated from a square grid and from variations of it.
RUTH TABANCAY‘s passion for science led her to study bacteriology in college, and after a stint as a hospital laboratory technologist, she went on to medical school. After 11 years in private practice, she left medicine to study art. Her bodies of work refer largely to her previous studies in microbiology, anatomy, and geometry. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley; University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco; and California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited regionally including the Museum of Craft and Design, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Southern Exposure, Root Division, Richmond Art Center, and Bedford Gallery and in venues nation-wide. She is a member of Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, California, and an active member of Surface Design Association and Pacific Rim Sculptors.