A shower tiled with hand-cut Penrose Tiles

From the 2023 Maple Conference Gallery

The attached image (see below) is that of a shower stall in my home that was installed using a Penrose tiling. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a Penrose tiling solves the longstanding question of whether it is possible to tile a plane surface with a pattern that repeats irregularly. The two types of Penrose tiles are the rhombs (thin and thick) and their dual (kites and darts). The wall tiles in the image were made from the two types of rhombs, the floor tiles used the kites and the darts.

Penrose tiling is fundamentally a 5-fold symmetry (thought to be impossible until quasi-crystals were discovered in nature) and the tiles are not manufactured commercially, so each had to be handmade. I used porcelain clay with a shino glaze for the thick rhombs, and, to obtain a contrasting colour for the thin rhombs, experimented with a variety of iron oxide additives. The tiles were fired to cone 10 in a reduction kiln over a period of several years, thus explaining the colour variation, because any reduction firing is always dependent on many things such as air temperature and pressure during the
firing, and what else is in the kiln. A contrasting blue (cobalt) glaze was used for the kites and perimeter tiles; these were fired in both reduction and electric kilns, again to cone 10.