Artists
Zinnira Bani
Designer / Illustrator
Singapore
Statement
My work focuses on visual identity and publication design. Six years ago, I began combining visual illusions and mathematical concepts such as M C Esher’s tessellation formulas, into an annual series of Chinese New Year red packets depicting zodiac animals. The combination of motifs, textures, colours and storytelling are uniquely crafted each year for the festive celebrations. My intent is to create curiosity and wonder into my artworks as much as possible.
Artworks
The patterns are designed for red packets or ‘hong bao’ to celebrate the Chinese New Year of the Fire Horse. The design features tessellated mares galloping and leaping through the herd across billowing ‘flames’ of jade green meadows. Based on Escher’s square type 1Ga (pg) formula with translation and a glide reflection, the design pays homage to cultural symbolism of horses and plane division. MǍ/RE, a portmanteau of ‘horse’( 马 - Mǎ ) in Chinese, and ‘mare’ (female horse) in English, was inspired by the wild mares' role and her sense of purpose in herd harmony. The tiles with two different poses are drawn and manually aligned in digital art software. Subtype ‘a’ (IH43) Parallelogram with designation base polygon T G T G'.
The patterns designed for the Chinese New Year red packets are inspired from pineapples and snakes. The supremely lucky fruit and auspicious zodiac animal in Chinese culture is created in translation and glide rotation tessellation technique. Based on Escher’s formula of hexagone type 1s, subtype b (IH12) T GS GS T G'S G'S. ‘ananas’ simply means pineapple in several cultural languages and this particular illustration celebrates the unique agriculture of pink and yellow pineapples. The repeated rows of colourful snaking serpents are based on existing Southeast Asian snake species.