Jessica K. Sklar and Bronna A. Butler

The artists have invented a cipher for this artwork. The piece includes the key to the cipher and a ciphertext message; the poem and the image to its right describe how to order the ciphertext’s triangles when deciphering. The pattern of subtriangles in the large central triangle comes from Aleš Drápal and Carlo Hämäläinen’s paper, “An enumeration of equilateral triangle dissections” (“Discret. Appl. Math.,” 158(14), 2010, 1479–1495), in which the authors analyze dissections of equilateral triangles into equilateral triangles. The ciphertext describes this pattern. (The coloring of the triangles is the artists’.) Deciphering details for this and the artists’ companion piece, “Color Coded” (2021), can be found via the above link.