About

Computed, not drawn.

The Canon is a series of twenty-nine plates. Each marks a moment when someone found a deep piece of the mathematical structure of reality, from the diagonal of the square to a single tile that never repeats.

The figure is the argument

Every plate is built so that you can see why its idea is true from the figure and a few words. Venus traces its five loops from its real orbit. The hydrogen orbitals are Schrödinger’s exact solutions, sliced through the nucleus. The two runs of the Lorenz attractor really do start a billionth apart. Nothing is drawn by eye: every curve comes from the mathematics or from measured data, and the notes behind each plate name the method and the sources.

Accurate to the letter

Names, dates, titles of works and numbers are checked against primary or scholarly sources. Where history is uncertain, the plate says so rather than overstating it.

One wall

All the plates share one layout, three typefaces and two grounds: a warm paper for geometry and mechanics, and a deep blue-black night for light, the sky and the quantum. They are designed to hang together in rows and read like a book, left to right.

Folios

The Canon is released in folios of six. Folio One spans 2,500 years, with three paper plates and three night plates. A plate’s number never changes, so the gaps in a folio are deliberate: later folios fill them.

The prints

Each plate is printed to order by theprintspace, a fine-art lab in London that also prints in Brooklyn for the United States. Paper plates go on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 308 gsm cotton. Night plates go on Canson Baryta Photographique, 310 gsm, which holds the deep ground and its faint glows. Every print is an open edition and comes with a certificate.

Frames are solid wood in black, white or oak, made in Germany and fitted by the lab. The small size is glazed with glass. The medium and large sizes use 3 mm acrylic, which travels safely by courier.

Questions

Write to hello@thecanon.store.