Marisa Brook

Statement

Using vector graphics, I create geometric tile art featuring bold lines and a few splashes of colour. This fact surprises me intensely, as I am a quantitative social scientist who has always loved mathematical art but certainly did not expect to develop a sudden interest in making it myself. The process (idle doodling, traced manually on my touch-screen laptop, then tweaked extensively) involves hours of what I can only describe as geometric play. My central preoccupation is symmetry, which has always fascinated me, and the process of developing a new design is essentially like solving a puzzle involving how many lines there are, where they are coming from, and where they are going.

Artworks

An interplay of rectilinear shapes and curves that add up to a near-optical-illusion of a repeating spiral in spite of the number of disruptions. Like most of my work, this began life as an idle doodle (on graph paper in my office), but quickly took on a life of its own. 95% of my doodles already have four-fold or eight-fold rotational symmetry, but I am rarely certain ahead of time what it is going to look like once I digitize it, clone it, and determine how the copies should meet at the corners. In this case, joining four of the gridlike segments around a central smaller square and adding only a small amount of curvature led to considerable bonus interest.