Soutache

Lumen & Logic

A dark portrait panel laid with a dozen and a half flat braids, each one a bundle of nine to twenty parallel lines at a single spacing shared by the whole sheet. There is one primitive: a centreline, offset a whole number of times at that spacing, so a straight run, a rounded corner, a square mitre and a rolled end are four pieces of one curve rather than four kinds of mark. A braid’s width is a whole number of spacings, which is what lets an end roll: the centreline continues as a spiral whose radial pitch is exactly the braid’s own width, so one wrap’s innermost line lands on the next wrap’s outermost and the scroll fills at the same spacing as the straight that fed it, at any radius. Where a braid is cut instead of rolled its lines stop one spacing short of each other and the end reads as a forty-five-degree staircase; where it turns square rather than rounding, its corners step out along the bisector by that same one spacing. The braids are grown one at a time by a self-avoiding walk against an occupancy grid, and every hairline of ground between two of them is a consequence of that order rather than anything drawn — as is every dead end, and every bare bay. Each braid is painted three times over the same path: once in the ground colour a hair wider than itself, once in a deep tone at its own spacing so consecutive bands overlap and the braid fills solid, then its crest lines on top in a light one. That single casing stroke is both the hairline channel between neighbours and the break where one braid passes over another, so the two measure the same by construction, and nothing anywhere is clipped, masked, blended or made transparent. Colour is one scalar: the geometry is grown first, so the total length is known, and hue advances monotonically with cumulative arclength to close the wheel exactly once over the sheet — a long braid graduates visibly along itself and its neighbours in the sequence continue its colour, so the panel reads as one rainbow rather than a set of coloured objects. The hand is two terms, and the one that is shared by every line of a braid cannot change a gap at all.

Medium: Generative algorithm, archival pigment print
Dimensions: 60 × 90 cm