Spirographs have long fascinated me as perfect graphic geometries, fun to draw, mathematically intriguing and almost impossible to do the same one twice. But to build one at 800mm in diameter, the gears get heavy and don’t move, and the paper tears under the weight. From a series of trail and error we devised a way of recreating a similar geometry by rotating a paper, which translates rotational movement via a series of cogs and fan belts, aluminium arms and rubber bands, to the pen held on a sliding arm. So by moving the pen along the arm just a few CM, the pattern is drastically changed. The machine holds two pens at once, and the process can be repeated to create something as dense or as sparse as the heart desires. We ran this exhibition as an interactive installation, producing prints on the spot, with a moving pen on moving paper. Each numbered ‘one of one’ owing to the fact that duplicating the same pattern is almost impossible.
