Ryan Webb
I am a math teacher at a school for gifted students. As such I am constantly answering two incredible questions: "Why?" and "What if...?" I encourage my students to always seek out answers to these questions. It is when we keep asking why and keep tinkering with the what if's that we stumble upon the most interesting things.
These two questions influence my art immensely. Though I have dabbled in many different art mediums, I am most fond of digital generative design, and other code based works. My most recent interests have been in the blending of code generated design and physical tangible objects that would be impossible to produce by hand.
I have always been fascinated by M.C. Escher's hyperbolic "Circle Limit" series. With these engravings I wanted to keep the spirit of that hyperbolic geometry in the Poincaré Disk model, but also wanted to add an element of depth to the pieces. I used Mathematica to generate the {5,4} hyperbolic shape, Inkscape to adjust the color scheme so that sections became lighter as the image approached the circle boundary, and finally engraved the design in Hardwood Maple. This tiling accentuates the curve within each tile giving a member of the "rose curve" family.