Nest Egg

I’ve been an avid listener of The Rest is Science podcast presented by Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens. The podcast started relatively recently and covers cool, curious and mysterious aspects of science and mathematics, often with relevance to the modern day, and often with a historical bent. One of the episodes discusses what an ellipse is and how to create one, and this piece started life by meditating on that.

In this episode, Hannah Fry explains that the path of an ellipse is a fixed combined distance from two points, or “foci”:

I considered how I might bring this to life in a piece of art…

I first considered an imaginary ellipse on the canvas and its path defined by its fixed combined distance from two foci. I then threw thousands of random points onto the canvas and calculated their combined distances from the two foci. The amount that each distance differed from that of the ellipse was used to vary the colour and thickness of the line.

As in some previous artwork, rather than a “purely” randomly located set of points, I’ve employed the Halton Sequence to generate a more evenly spaced set of locations for the “random” points. I also played with how the colours were defined and how each of the random points were connected to each other to give several variations on a theme before settling on the final piece:

In what is becoming a tradition in naming my pieces, this piece started life with the name Ellipsis in a nod to the theme, however with the resulting nest-like messiness and egg shaped result, the name Nest Egg felt more appropriate.