The very first thing I wanted to see after moving to Washington was a starfish. Eh-hm. Sorry. A sea star. They were everywhere in tidepools out on the Pacific coast. They were a kind of gateway to discovering all the other tidepool creatures. Drawn back again and again, I ended up spending year after year learning the rhythms of the Pacific with a camera in hand. One late evening I happened to be leaping from rock to rock at low tide when I fell into a musical trance while listening to Loreena McKennitt. The music amplified the ocean and in my trance-dance, I became intensely aware of the mathematics and physics underpinning it’s motion as well as the incredible power sea water has on life itself.
The number 5 comes up a lot in tide pool creatures, not just in sea stars. Hmmm… something is driving this particular symmetry… most crystals are regular, repeating structures. 4-fold, 3-fold, and 6-fold. They tile a plane or cube with no gaps. But 5-food symmetry doesn’t work. There are odd-shaped gaps and symmetry falls apart. Until Penrose (a mathematician who was friends with MC Escher) came along with his quasicrystal idea. With quasicrystals, a set of regular shapes are tiled following specific rules. The pattern which emerges is a five-fold quasicrystal.
The beauty of a quasicrystal is that it is both always itself, and also always emerging as a new arrangement of five-fold symmetries. There’s growth (one of the requirements for something to be considered alive), where regular crystals are static.
Quasicrystals were all well and good as a theory, until an actual, physical quasicrystal was discovered fairly recently with electron scanning microscope. Each atom lined up exactly as predicted by Penrose. Even more, I happened to discover that this same quasicrystal aligns perfectly with the Islamic 10-pointed star geometry which you see in the night sky here.
There is an underlying geometry and mathematics defining the physical structures of life, and this quasicrystal is one part of those ‘rules’.
So that’s what I’d like to share about some of the symbols in this piece. But if you’d like to just meet me for a dance-trance at the ocean, I’d be down for that too.
Oil on Canvas, 2018
