Visual Composition

Tessellation

This page is dedicated to a new project I have been developing recently, named tessellation. It brings together visual art and music, which inside my mind are one and the same.

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Tessellation is an ongoing series of visual compositions that investigates the relationship between musical structure and geometric space. Rather than illustrating sound, these works translate compositional processes - including repetition, counterpoint, motivic permutations, and rhythmic organisation - into visual form.

Beginning as systems constructed in graphic software, each drawing is subsequently retraced on paper by hand in black ink. This deliberate return to the hand introduces subtle irregularities that counter the precision of algorithmic construction.

Influenced by Persian tessellation, Chinese lattice patterns, M.C. Escher, Piet Mondrian and the logic of musical canons*, the drawings exist simultaneously as abstract images and as potential scores. They invite viewers to move between reading and looking, between visual pattern and imagined sound.

The project explores notation as a visual language rather than a purely functional one, asking how music might inhabit the page without requiring performance. It poses the question:

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CAN MUSICAL THOUGHT EXIST INDEPENDENTLY OF SOUND? 

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* I've made extensive use of different varieties of canons in works since 2013 such as Pots 'n Pans Falling, Fugue States, The Grey Tree, Clairvoyant, Confluence, A Life in a Day, and Rescriptio.