Rhythms of the Land: Spring
An art installation at Pomona College by Frank A. Farris
Mock-up of the three panels
As an undergraduate at Pomona College in the class of 1977, I spent many hours walking alone in the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Gardens, often dreaming of mathematics.
The revelation that there were spaces whose points were functions delighted me. Over the many years of my career, I have learned how to use function spaces, specifically spaces of complex-valued functions on the plane, to create mathematical art. My book, "Creating Symmetry: the Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns" from Princeton University Press, tells the whole story.
Each banner in the installation takes its colors from a photograph of plants that I took in April, 2022, while visiting Pomona for my 45th reunion. I hope that the patterns evoke my love for the land near the College, and my hopes for its protection.
The installation shows three patterns printed on canvas by Spoonflower, then hemmed and hung on dowels. Browse the patterns and look back and forth between pattern and source photograph.
In this time when the patterns of nature are threatened, I think that we hunger for patterns, for repetition. For me, symmetry works as a sort of "comfort food for the eyes." I hope the time you spend looking closely will provide a meditative and peaceful experience, whether you are viewing the installaion in person or the digital images here.
The Yucca Blooms
A woven basket opens to the sky
I started with a wallpaper pattern of type p6, whose only symmetries are translation, 6-fold rotation, and all the others that follow. I morphed the pattern along a horizontal axis by effectively turning the source photograph upside down. Then I tilted the morphing pattern by 60 degrees and mirrored to create a single yard of fabric. The progress of the pattern represents opening to the sky.
Blooming Yucca
Good wallpaper patterns often result from photographs with contrasting color fields. The way the yucca bloom extends through the shrubs to the sky helped with the weaving effect in the banner.
A Matilija PoppyChevron
Petals, moths, or angels anchor the center of the triptych
My favorite type of wallpaper is invariant under a symmetry group called pmg. I found a good pattern based on the photo of the poppies and tilted it so that the diagonal of a generating rectangle (whose proportion is the golden ratio) became horizontal. Two copies of the pattern reflected vertically make one yard of fabric. Virtual gold braid frames the sides.
Matilija Poppies
These poppies were originally framed by greenery of the poppy bush. I photoshopped them into a picture of the mountains on a perfect day. Unfortunately, the foreground of that photo was the parking lot of the Ontario Airport.
Penstemon Path
The flowers fall to earth
The left-to-right rhythm of this fabric mimics the sky-to-sand downward progress of the photograph. The pattern type is one called p31m and again the originally horizontal morphing pattern has been tilted and carefully scaled to allow the printed fabric to match at top and bottom. The sky at the left and the sandy path at the right bring us back to a grounded feeling.
Penstemon Path
On my day in April, the penstemon were going wild. It was hard to capture the intensity of their spring display. In the banner made from this photograph, I was surprised how important the sandy color of the path became in the design.
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The three banners were installed in Estella Laboratory, home of the Pomona College Mathematics and Statistics Department, in August 2022. (Photo by Liz Gutierrez.)