Richard Hassell

Statement

Richard Hassell is an architect and artist. His architectural practice WOHA focuses on high density, high sustainability projects, with projects in Asia, Australia and the Middle East. Richard has an ongoing artistic project: Aperiodic Division of the Plane, which is a continuation of Escher's tessellation and tiling project, using geometry that was not available to Escher during his lifetime, using Penrose tiles, Amman tiles and other aperiodic geometries. During this project he developed a set of tiles which incorporate plane filling curves, the FlowTile set. Richard's tessellations are on display in the Australian National University Mathematics Department and are being placed in the Oxford Mathematics Institute.

Artworks

This perforated screen element is an aperiodic tiling comprising a single 3d-tile, which can be used in either front or back orientation to tile a plane. The 3d tile has a different design on the front and the back. The front and the back of the screen each have a space-filling curve on them that winds around the holes in the screen, but on each side the path traces a different journey. The arrangement is generated by substitution method, the plane filling curve is based on 5 squares arranged in a cross.

This is a pattern based on a square FlowTile, a set of tiles incorporating a space-filling curve. A line traces a journey from the mid left to the bottom right corner. The design uses visual reversal as in the well-known vase-face or rabbit-duck examples. Here a white creeper drapes down over a black wall, or a black creeper grows up from the base to cover a white wall. The black and white creepers never intersect or cross, each fits the other perfectly. The fractal nature is revealed in the vertical lines which appear as a visual artefact. The larger the patch of tiles, the longer these vertical lines get, as the tiling is aperiodic in nature - the elements repeat but the overall arrangement does not.

This is a tessellation based on a hexagonal FlowTile, a set of tiles incorporating a fractal curve, in this example, the Gosper Curve. The golden thread traces a line through every tile, and the fish fill the plane along a fractal line from the bottom left to the bottom right. This tessellation can be of infinite size, the fish will still follow each other always facing forward along the golden line. The fish are all the same tile design, with a mirror image version, and 3 colour versions of each. The fish facing right have a darker underbelly, while the fish facing left have a darker back. from a distance, this dark and light colouring reveal the fractal figure.