Edition of 3 of 8

Pigment Ink on sustainable bamboo Awagami washi paper

118 x 84 cm (46.46 x 33.07 in)

This tessellation is based on a substitution tiling called the Birds and Bees tiling discovered by Joshua Socolar (1959—), which has a ten-fold basic geometry. I first tried to make it into birds and bees, but the strange creatures knew what they actually were – Crabs and Catfishes.

A Crab Canon is a piece of music with two musical lines that are complementary when played forward and backward, like a musical palindrome. J. S Bach wrote a famous one in his Musical Offering, which is discussed in detail in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, the Pullizer prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter.

Due to its strong axes of symmetry, this tessellation is a kind of visual palindrome, with endlessly repeating motifs flowing left and right, up and down, backwards and forwards.