Bradford Hansen-Smith

As a child, I puzzled over things I saw. Drawing was how I made sense of them. Eventually, I began building models to understand form and structure more deeply.

I worked as a sculptor for many years, creating images and objects, before feeling a need to understand more about spatial patterns of movement and how they function. Buckminster Fuller was my introduction to geometry—an experience that changed my life.

Inspired by Fuller’s explorations of two- and three-dimensional geometry, and by how he folded the spherical VE from four paper plates, I realized that all geometry—and later, math—could be learned through folding paper circles. This opened a new way of thinking about the circle, geometry, and the nature of relationships. Folding circles became what I did.

Through years of folding and reading The Urantia Book, I began to see both the grandeur of cosmic order and the smallest biological details revealed within the creases formed by each fold.

Sharing this process is central to my work as an educator. I’ve worked with students and adults of all ages across the U.S. and internationally, each experience adding to a shared understanding of what the circle can reveal. Folding, drawing, and writing are the three ways I study and document this process I call Wholemovement™.

I studied at the University of Southern California, Cooper Union in New York, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I received the Anna Louise Raymond Traveling Fellowship for Sculpture and spent a year in Florence, Italy, learning to cast bronze.When I realized I needed to change what I was doing, geometry entered my life.

Thirty-six years later, I continue to work with my hands and mind—aligning with my heart and the symmetry in each first fold of the circle. This work still leads me deeper into the same questions that first captured me as a child.