Reinterpreting the Tile

Last week I dropped a tiny hint in my Islamic Tiles – Part 1 post about a new idea I’ve been exploring for my thesis. In my exploration of binaries, one of my most important non-formal comparisons is pattern/plainness. I decided that one way that I could achieve this would be to address the surface of my tape cast tiles, which were previously  blank [and a bit of a missed opportunity]. So I began with one of my biggest inspirations: Islamic tile. I’ve always admired the geometric aspect of Islamic tiles for their radial patterns and mathematical precision but I was ignoring the decorative floral motifs that make up a whole different category of Islamic art. So I got a lot of books and started drawing. I wanted to reference these patterns but also reinterpret them.

My initial intention was to bring this drawing into Rhino as a bitmap and hand-trace the designs but Bryan suggested that I upload the image into Adobe Illustrator instead, where I could trace the lines with one simple command and then turn them into editable curves to be brought into Rhinoceros. This saved me a ton of time and a lot of accuracy. The image below is the traced drawing from Illustrator.

After the designs were exported as curves I brought the file into Rhino and started playing. I was able to split the curves and reorganize them, using the mirror, rotation and polar array commands to create completely new symmetrical patterns. My plan is to use these designs on the surfaces of my necklace tiles with etching and underglaze mishima techniques.