Shirr

Lumen & Logic

A sheet covered edge to edge with fine coloured threads, gathered into waves that crest in step and comb out flat along one side. Nothing in the picture is drawn: every thread is a level set of one smooth scalar field, found by following it rather than by placing it. The field is calibrated so that its derivative across the stack is bounded away from zero, which makes crossing, merging, looping and ending impossible rather than merely unlikely — two threads that start in order stay in order over the whole sheet, and every one of them runs from one edge of the frame to another. The same bound turns the gradient into the composition: the distance between neighbouring level sets is exactly 2π/|∇Φ|, so it is a thread’s own width, and every dark passage in the picture is threads crowded together with their gaps showing while every bright one is threads opened out. No tone is ever computed and there is no lighting model, because there is nothing for one to light. The wave runs along the threads rather than across them, orthogonal to the stack, which is why it can swing a thread past two of its neighbours and undulate two dozen times down the sheet without the stack ever folding; two systems in golden ratio beat against each other so the crest chains never repeat, and one shared field carries them, so neighbouring threads crest together and the crests line up into long oblique chains that nothing draws. Colour works at two scales at once — one slow turn of the palette read as a wheel, laid diagonally across the sheet, and a fixed offset per thread of a fraction of a step around that wheel, so a red filament runs through a blue passage and the surface shimmers. Every length is a fraction of the frame and the only pixel-valued constant in the package is the sub-pixel ink conservation rule, so a thumbnail and a full-size export are the same picture.

Medium

Generative algorithm, archival pigment print

Dimensions

64 × 90 cm