Artwork copyright Timea Tihanyi. Photo courtesy of the artist, 2022.

Artwork copyright Timea Tihanyi. Photo courtesy of the curator, Renee Adams, 2023.

Colors of a Punctured Donut #3, 2019

Timea Tihanyi
(Hungarian | American, born 1969)

Location: Walla Walla Community College, Walla Walla

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Colors of a Punctured Donut by Timea Tihanyi is a ceramic vessel that grew out of a 2019 collaboration with mathematician Sara Billey. The vessel is made using the process of chip-firing, a mathematical modeling technique. Chip-firing games consist of a theoretical game board where sand can pile up in each cell. When the cell is full, the sand topples over to the neighboring cells. From an art perspective, simple sets of rules are being applied in a repetitive fashion, which leads to an unexpected complexity of patterns.

While the pattern was generated using the technical process of coding, the ceramic material softens the result. The game board’s opposite edges are stitched together top to bottom and left to right, forming a donut. It shows a specific distribution of the sand grains on the game board after the one-millionth iteration of the chip-firing algorithm.

This artwork is part of a curated collection by Renee Adams in March 2023 for a new Science & Technology Building at Walla Walla Community College, in Southeastern Washington. The collection brings together artists who combine art and science. They use scientific approaches such as observation and experimentation, precise measurements and calculations. A desire to learn more about our world and share that knowledge is at the heart of both scientific and creative pursuits.

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with Walla Walla Community College.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Timea Tihanyi's artworks explore "the connection, and sometimes conflict, between intuition and logic, emotion and rationalism, the phsyical experience of the body and the cognitive experience of the mind."

Tihanyi was born in Hungary, Europe, and lives and works in Seattle, Western Washington. She is a professor at the University of Washington's Interdisciplinary Visual Arts program. She is also the director of Slip Rabbit, a technoceramics studio that explores the intersections of art, design, architecture, science, and engineering.