© Pat Ashforth, Steve Plummer & Ben Ashforth 2018           Contact us

THE WINDMILLS OF YOUR MIND

by

Pat Ashforth, Steve Plummer & Ben Ashforth

In September 2018, Matt Parker and Katie Steckles put out a call for artists to collaborate with their Mirror Pillar project. They had a 2 metre high, 100 kg, mirrored pillar for creating anamorphic pictures.

An anamorphic image is one that appears normal only when seen from some particular perspective or when viewed through something such as a mirror.

They were mainly looking for artists who could work with them, and the general public, at various science festivals and other venues, to create designs that would look distorted on the floor but would be correct in the pillar. We were not in a position to do that but could create a design to be placed against the pillar to show a design that we had previously used in knitting.

Matt and Katie had produced a lot of resources (which can be downloaded on the Mirror Pillar site) to use with the pillar, and mini-pillars. We adapted our design to fit more closely to their instructions.

Photo courtesy of Mirror Pillar

The original knitted blanket was called Tilting at Windmills. It had a grid of 9 x 11 ‘half-and-half squares’.  The new design has 10 x 12 squares to correspond with the grids being used for the project.

The grids are semi-circular but we did not have enough space, at home, to make a semi-circle and opted for a quarter circle instead.



This is a computer-generated image of what we were aiming for. It is not accurate. The proportions are not what you would see in the mirror but it helped us to plan what to do next.