Mola

Lumen & Logic

A dark panel carrying a few dozen flat marks in two inks, printed by a wallpaper group. The marks are packed once inside a single lattice cell and then emitted at every image of themselves under the group generated by one lattice translation and one half-turn about the sheet's centre, so the picture is exactly invariant under turning it upside down — occlusions included, not only silhouettes — and every shape in it occurs an even number of times with half of them inverted, while the marks themselves run clean across the lattice so the sheet reads as a print rather than as a tiling. There is one drawing primitive: a centreline swept at a width profile, capped round, capped with a ball, or run to a cusp, so a long lumpy creature body, a pointed leaf, a serpentine that finishes in a fat ball, a lollipop and a plain bullseye are five settings of one operator rather than five shapes. A mark’s silhouette is the union of its swept band and its terminal discs and is never a boolean: the same construction recomputed one keyline wider is exactly its outward offset, and painting that offset in the ground colour immediately under the mark's own ink is the whole of the picture’s depth — it is what puts a channel of bare ground of one constant width between every pair of neighbours, and what breaks the mark underneath by exactly that same width wherever one crosses another, with nothing anywhere clipped, masked, blended or made transparent. Everything cut into a mark — round holes that shrink along its axis, a comb of round-ended slots down one flank, a nested eye of concentric discs, an accent swash that is the mark's own centreline drawn again and thinner — is placed at a station along that centreline and measured against the local width, so it rides round every bend, and it carries no casing at all, which is why a nested thing touches its host while two separate marks never do. An eye reshapes what carries it: the body is bulged to at least twice the eye’s radius before the sweep runs, so the swelling is the eye’s own doing. Nothing in the package knows what a face is — a body that happens to take a comb, a run of shrinking holes, one eye and one swash simply reads as a head, and a seed is free to produce a sheet with no creature in it.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

60 × 90 cm