An Extremely Tiny Double Coin Knot Ring (Newsletter No. 26)
2012 ish, I saw an image in my head and was consumed with the idea of making a tiny knot flower, the tiniest double coin knot ring.
I already made 2 others in varying larger sizes out of wax wire, but I wanted the smallest tiniest one, and the wax wire readily available to me didn’t come that thin.
It became an intermittent backburner months-long quest.
I went into bead stores and tested knot their elastics, cotton cords, nylon. These were easy to tie but didn’t have the same tension in the structure imagined in my head. Wiry, if you will.
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Came across a piece of electrical wire and after playing with it, figured it was the perfect pliability to easily make a knot and had enough hardness to hold its shape the way I wanted. Made 2 more in smaller larger sizes (total is now 4).
I looked up what the thinnest gauge of that coated electrical wire was, and I looked up what that gauge of wire was used for…
Went to Best Buy, Radio Shack, Home Depot. All the light fixture stores in Chinatown. Every store that looked like a hardware store. The wires were almost always too thick or too kinky or too floppy.
Eventually I found a junk hardware store in Chinatown, somewhere around Canal Street. Finally found the wire I needed with the perfect thinness and tension and bendiness attached to some battery case parts. It felt pivotal, even though not one person in the rest of the world knew what I was doing, it was a shift only I knew. It was summer. I was walking back home from my job, trying to save subway fare.
Inefficient and meandering but totally absorbed and enjoyable actually, I do look fondly upon that time in my life :). I still love doing things slow so much.
Anyways, back to the knot. I got the wire and made two more tinier and tiniest ones. They’re little and sweet and slightly crooked just like they were tied out of the fragile a stem of a daisy, just like they was made in a secret treehouse. For yourself, for someone else, by someone else. Full days and afternoons completely absorbed by weeds, bark, sticks, acorns, dirt, mud, streams, rocks, worms, moths, roly polys, grasshoppers (watch out for poison ivy and bees).
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Symbolism
The Ancient Chinese were such pros at symbolism, sometimes it makes me dizzy.
A single symbol can have a few layers of metaphors tied to it. An object is never just an object, a knot is never just pretty (I suppose this is true for all ancient cultures).
The double coin knot was the first Chinese knot created (~475-221 BCE). It gets its name because it looks like two coins overlapping. Unlike for many Western cultures, money is not necessarily synonymous with greed. Coins in Chinese culture symbolize prosperity in all spheres of your life: money, health, love. A pair of coins is called 双泉 shuāng quán, which is a pun for “both together complete” 双全 shuāng quán. In the past newlyweds would gift the knots to each other to symbolize loyalty.
Tying the knot: In Chinese the word knot 结 jié means ‘getting married’
Did I mention it looks like a flower? It’s the perfect balance between simplicity and intricacy. Its beauty makes it mathematical, not like cold abstracted geometry but rather like a reflection of nature’s sense of harmony, even in its wildness.
Art from the perspective of math: “Mathematics captures patterns that the universe finds pleasant, if you like—patterns that are implicit in the way the universe works.”- Keith Devlin
Math from the perspective of art: “Because--the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times ... Still with greatness, there's a jolt at the end of the wire. It doesn't matter how often you grab hold of the line, or how many people have grabbed hold of it before you. It's the same line. Fallen from a higher life. It still carries some of the same shock.”- The Goldfinch
Sources: https://www.chinaexpeditiontours.com/blog/chinese-knot-which-has-a-long-history-and-a-symbolic-meaning/
https://chineseknotting.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/double-coin-knot-story-and-tutorial/
http://primaltrek.com/impliedmeaning.html