A tessellated floor
Since the Just like Escher exhibition held between November 2023 and March 2024, the striking modular carpet from Studio Wae has been on display on the second floor at Escher in The Palace. This floor covering lends a contemporary touch to Escher’s legacy, above all doing so in a sustainable, circular way through the use of waste materials.
Set up by Tynke van den Heuvel (1975) in 2017, Studio Wae is a pioneering design studio striving to raise awareness when it comes to the recycling of raw materials. Studio Wae uses manufacturing waste to create modern design often inspired by Escher’s work. Escher in The Palace opted for colourful versions of the Polygon Rug and City Flooring, in which Escherian patterns feature prominently.
The modular function of the tiles dovetails neatly with Escher’s work. Studio Wae’s floors comprise individual parts, allowing them to be pieced together like a jigsaw. The way in which the shapes fit together is akin to the myriad versions of tessellations that Escher produced. Escher regarded a tessellation as a motif, the outer lines of which join seamlessly on all sides, enabling the pattern to continue ad infinitum. The many visits that Escher made to the Alhambra in the Spanish city of Granada were his major source of inspiration. This Spanish-Islamic fort and palace complex is bursting with all kinds of mosaic featuring abstract motifs, which he eagerly drew and made his own. These drawing sessions constitute an important foundation for the tessellations that he subsequently incorporated more and more into his work as cycles and metamorphoses.
Hence Studio Wae’s designs look like they have been extracted from Escher’s prints. Both the recognisable cube pattern from Polygon Rug and the pattern in the gallery on the second floor feature as tessellations in the print Cycle (1938). This print marks an early highlight in Escher’s oeuvre – a perfect amalgamation of the abstraction of a tessellation, the change intrinsic to a metamorphosis and the infinitude of the amazing world created by Escher.
