Underlying Structures

I’m a multi disciplinary artist who is interested in the underlying structure of patterns.

There is a beautiful, intricate dance that occurs in our brains in order to understand what we see. The eyes take in an image and almost instantaneously we decode and process patterns – looking for repetition. But what happens when we try to decipher something that appears to be more chaotic, such as an aperiodic pattern? Is chaos just another kind of order waiting to be discovered? If a pattern doesn’t repeat, but retains an unknowable order, can chaos ever be truly understood?

These questions compelled me to research non-repeating patterns such as the Penrose pattern, discovered in the 1970s. This then led me to the quasicrystal, 6-dimensional sibling discovered in the 1980s. The quasicrystal is a crystal structure that matched the two dimensional Penrose tiling, first discovered in the lab and then later in a rare 4.6 billion year old meteorite. If these quasicrystal patterns are not of this earth but, instead of extraterrestrial origin, could it mean that aperiodicity is alien?

My installations introduce interference to quasicrystal patterns, generating a formless formalism. New hybrid forms are created from the intermixing of periodic with the aperiodic. Combining established terrestrial methods of interaction such as diffracted light, orthographic string projections and rhombic tiling with the extraterrestrial quasicrystal pattern, the unexpected emerges. With each piece, aperiodicty in its very complexity imparts a profound new meaning to the underlying structure of our reality. 

My website is christinesoccio.com

Twitter: csoccio

Thank you for your interest in my work.