Edition of 2 of 12

Pigment Ink on sustainable bamboo Awagami washi paper

118 x 84 cm (46.46 x 33.07 in)

Penrose Fish II is not actually a Penrose Tiling, although at first it looks very similar to my print Penrose Fish I. However, a careful study will show that while the smaller fish is the same, it occurs here in both original and mirrored form. You will also discover the larger fish is not the same as in the Penrose Fish I tessellation, it has a different profile.

How is this possible? Well the tiles actually go through a process of mirroring so it is like concentric rings of Penrose tiles that alternate between the mirrored and original form. My discovery of this through the tessellation artwork led me to discover there can be infinite nested sets of Penrose tiles where they pass on matching rules to the next ring in sequence. This tessellation illustrates the simplest form, with two sets of two tiles, where you can easily see the sequence of colours that cycle from yellow to blue to green to orange and back to yellow again.

This is a part of the “Full House” series, a collection of special works from my research that don’t fit into the exhibition series but are nonetheless very interesting. They are very large, taking up almost the full sheet. They are signed together with a custom hand applied seal in the bottom right corner of the artwork, so they can be framed with a mount up to the image boundary, if desired, as the signature doesn’t extend into the border.