Tony Twigg

The subject of a picture can be hard to identify. An obvious image could be the armature of an esoteric consideration. Emotion caught in paint as it describes a mundane scene might be the subject. It seems to me that the subject is a pattern. Something like a map of the space between order and chaos that harbors an invitation to change.

I wondered if such a pattern could be expressed as a mathematical equation? It can, it’s called a binomial expansion, a triangular array of numbers generated by successively adding two preceding numbers in a sequence that begins with one and an assumed zero.

More interesting than the mathematics of the pattern is the fact that it has hypnotised people living across the disparate cultures of recorded history. The pattern seems to describe the passage from nothing to many and from unknown to known. An early rendering in 1303 by Chu Shi Chieh described it as the “Jade mirror of the 4 unknowns (heaven, earth, man and matter). In this poetic dimension, the equation or code generates a giddying labyrinth. A reciprocal code presents a contraction charting the road back to order but from a vantage point within the labyrinth, tangible destinations become possible.