Visual Composition

Tessellation

An ongoing series of visual compositions exploring the relationship between musical structure and geometric space.

Tessellation brings together visual art and music, two forms of thinking that, in my mind, are closely connected.

Rather than illustrating sound, these works translate musical ways of organising material into visual form through repetition, counterpoint, transformation, and rhythm.

Although based on precise geometric and compositional principles, every work is drawn entirely by hand in black ink on paper. The subtle irregularities that come with this process form an essential part of the work, bringing a human presence to otherwise highly structured systems.

Influenced by Persian tessellation, Chinese lattice patterns, M.C. Escher, Piet Mondrian, and the logic of musical canons*, the drawings exist simultaneously as abstract images and as traces of musical thinking. They invite the viewer to move between reading and looking, between visual pattern and imagined sound.

CAN MUSICAL THOUGHT EXIST INDEPENDENTLY OF SOUND? 

The project began with notation, but asks what happens when musical ideas are allowed to exist on the page as autonomous visual structures.

Sound

The first work to use Tessellation drawings as an integral part of the score is Paranoia for xylophone and marimba. It will be performed on November 3, 2026 at Notional Space in Vancouver. Earlier works that make use of visual drawings are Wie Dieper Graaft, and Das Lied der Schwermuth.

Ultimately, I would like to see these drawings exhibited in a space where they are accompanied by live music that responds to them.

I am currently developing a solo performance on electric violin, using delay and looping, in which I respond to the visual structures through live sound. In this way, the process comes full circle: musical thinking becomes visual form, and visual structures become sound again.

A short video of the project Tessellation:

Prototype recordings below:

* I've made extensive use of different varieties of canons in works since 2013 such as Pots 'n Pans Falling, Fugue States, The Grey Tree, Clairvoyant, Confluence, A Life in a Day, and Rescriptio.