Patterns:
Persistent
Memories

The ornamental tile designs I remember from the living room in Havana are the foundation of this project.

A collected online layout illustration shows the continuous floral field and the border designs, which match the floor arrangement I remember.

Each pattern contains a carefully balanced arrangement of curved lines, botanical forms, repeated motifs, and contrasting colours. Individually, the tiles are small decorative compositions. Together, they create a larger visual rhythm across an architectural surface. That collected layout reference reveals something the individual tiles cannot show on their own: a central field of repeating motifs, encircled by border designs that turn at the edges and bring the entire room into visual harmony.

I have always been fascinated by the relationship between an individual geometric element and the more complex structures that emerge through repetition.

These patterns connect my personal memories of Havana with a broader appreciation of traditional craftsmanship and ornamental design.

The motifs shown here reproduce historic tile designs that I remember from the living room of my Havana home. I collected these particular reference images online years later; I did not photograph or draw them. I understand the underlying ornamental designs to be historic and in the public domain. The creators and reuse terms of these modern reference files have not yet been independently identified.

My interest in fractal geometry provided an opportunity to revisit these patterns from an entirely different perspective.

Using Mandelbulb3D, I began exploring how decorative two-dimensional imagery could inform complex spatial compositions.

Through iterative experiments with form, scale, camera position, surface structure, and lighting, familiar visual rhythms evolved into unexpected architectural environments and abstract geometries.

The original tiles were not themselves fractals. Rather, their ornamental structure served as a point of departure for an exploration of computational form and mathematical complexity.

The resulting images suggest an imagined world in which the patterns of a remembered house have expanded into monumental structures and unfamiliar spaces.

In the final stage of Patterns: Persistent Memories, the experiments created in Mandelbulb3D become the starting point for further artistic development in Adobe Photoshop. Colour, light, atmosphere, contrast, scale, and composition are refined through an intentional process of selection and interpretation.

These artworks do not reproduce the Havana floor tiles literally. Instead, they carry forward the ornamental rhythms, repetition, and underlying sense of geometric order that remained in my visual memory. The results are independent images: imagined architectures, dense sculptural fields, layered structures, and luminous spaces.

Some compositions move inward toward intricate forms and fragments; others expand into monumental towers and distant environments. In each, computational possibilities meet the artistic judgement shaped by my experience in drawing, painting, and printmaking.

The final work in this sequence, Mandelbay City IX, widens the visual field into an open horizon. After the intensity of the preceding works, its panoramic scale offers distance and a sense of continuation—as though the remembered patterns had become a world extending beyond the frame.