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Patterns and ornament have adorned the human environment for millennia: existing in artwork and design from clothing to architecture, on our tools and our vessels, aligning texts, and embellishing our skin. Originally developed locally and on small scales, then growing more complex and coming to represent larger systems, most pattern imagery has been derived from nature, extracted from the living chaos of ecology to make ordered visual forms. Other motifs have come from the invention of mathematics, generating geometry from human consciousness.
To create patterns, lines can be drawn to create curves, wobbles, and zigs. Dots can be stippled with a stylus and arranged to distinguish foreground from background, indicate depth, or create movement. Shapes can be arranged to invoke spatial reasoning and rhythm. These can all be processed through shifts in scale and repetition to invent a dance of marks. To create color, wavelengths of light are organized by laying down chromatic pigment onto surfaces, which then stimulate rods and cones in the eye. The combinations of these fundamentals have built a means for endless variation and set the stage for the evolution of visual language. Slowly, novel combinations have accrued meaning and specificity, rooting them in place, time, people, and thought. What might be initially read as only decorative can also be seen as functional, telling stories through images and linking individuals and groups together, indicative of the formation of cultures.
Once invented, ornament has inevitably crossed between societies—borrowed, appropriated, or imposed. As some locales became more interconnected, markets also began to develop that looked to exchange or transact examples of form. Foreign and sometimes clashing societies intermixed, and both productive trade as well as tragic violence occurred. Colonialist imperatives and shifting power structures preserved and replicated some cultural idioms, but they also subsumed and eliminated many cultural legacies and languages that had developed over millennia.
Some forms that were preserved became more widely dispersed around the 15th century, when printers began producing books of patterns, used primarily as instructional guides for textile designers, artists, and artisans. These books became commercial products, and as they became popular, pattern hunters set out to locales across the globe to discern and copy elements of design from disparate cultures. A bit later, Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament was published, as perhaps the most international and comprehensive of them. It contains over a hundred color plates of ornamental patterns from around the world.
Complex geometric patterns from Islamic cultures as diverse as Moorish Spain, Mamluk Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, and Safavid Persia; florid decorations from European books and churches; and exuberant Indian chintz and bright colors dyed from madder and indigo began to penetrate other parts of the world. Geometries and botanical motifs were exported from China and Japan in ornate cloth, ceramics, and printed books, and the complex repetition of shapes, figuration, and abstraction from sub-Saharan Africa made their way to global trading ports. The spare and exacting forms from Indigenous American cultures like the Algonquin, Hopi, and Navajo, and more “baroque” designs from Tlingit, Aztec, Maya, and Incan societies—and vivid pigments made from cochineal—were transposed to other continents. Bark cloth tapestries with novel arrangements of shapes traveled from the most remote Polynesian islands to places across the globe.
As forms that developed in isolated societies transferred between cultural systems, they transformed into a kind of “information.” Ornament that had heretofore only existed on one locally significant building or in a hand-drawn manuscript could suddenly be replicated and spread by the technology of printing. They then carried with them the elements of cultural significance now extracted from their points of origin. As these visual schemata shifted meaning, they became what is known as an “index,” or in the parlance of academics, a “sign”—a kind of symbolic form that represents a set of ideas.
Visual arrangements become lumped together as representative of something larger, such as star geometries from Islamic societies, lattice ornaments from China, or Celtic knots from Ireland. Our mental models of information synthesis have become adept at generating shorthands to perceive systems, possibly evolving in tandem with cultural development. This means of perception applies to pre-modern forms, and extends to modern design like polka dots, stars, stripes, bunting, psychedelia, minimalism, and “branded” design that includes imprinted patterned fabrics or corporate logos. In our current period of smartphones, image searches, and the endless scroll, we are constantly inundated with visual stimulation, memes, and cultural messages. The ability to “read” pictorial information that exudes cultural symbolism has become second nature, and is performed countless times by individuals (and now algorithms) each day.
Jacob Hashimoto’s prints include a vast array of patterns isolated into circular “kite” forms, drawing from this history and functioning as a kind of index. They are cataloged in proximity to one another, much like a printed book of patterns that spans a wide array of visual languages. Each shape is filled with a different arrangement of forms developed by Hashimoto, with many obliquely or directly referencing pre-existing motifs. Displaying the endless varieties that can be developed from the simple elements of design, the prints also function as a set of signs. In them, we can see the continued projection of meaning derived from the long history of humans using simple sets of variables to create complex forms.
Butt Johnson is an artist based in Brooklyn.
