Vincent Schumacher

Statement

My goal is to create photographs made of images on tiles that connect seamlessly with the images on adjacent tiles. Since no symmetries can be assumed within the images themselves, every image, and the tile it is on, must be mirrored across every edge it shares with another tile. This restriction causes some odd results. For example, in many mosaics, patterns are formed by contrasting tiles with their adjacent tiles, but these seamless pictures actually hide the tiles, instead forming patterns using the images on the tiles. As with tessellations, square and triangular tiles can fill spaces, but in contrast, hexagons cannot. Even with these restrictions, I have found that this method allows unlimited ways to build seamless photographs.

Artworks

I wanted to create a seamless photo emulating a gentle curved wave. For this, two 15º triangles sharing an edge - one pointing to the right, one pointing to the left - were cut out of a photo of tree branches against a blue sky. The first triangle was reflected up and to the right along its longest edge 5 times to create a combined image with a corner of 15º * 6, or 90º. The same was done for the second triangle, reflecting down and to the left instead. These combined images were cropped into a long, vertical rectangle, which was mirrored once along its right edge and once along its left to finalize the image.