Art for Honor: Pete and Heidi Robb

Heidi and Pete are the founders of Cherry Arbor Design, a Michigan-based workshop specializing in creating handcrafted products that explore the intersection of math and art. Their work often centers around tiles that tessellate, or fill the plane without gaps. While typical tilings are repetitive, they are drawn to aperiodic tiles, which do not allow for this repetition. In 2022, David Smith, a retired printmaker and amateur mathematician, discovered a single aperiodic shape called an Einstein tile. This shape is resistant to forming patterns, which is visually intriguing.

Heidi and Pete have explored several varieties of Einstein tiles in their work, using materials like wood, felt, and ceramic. Their latest piece, called “The Einstein Tiles,” features three examples of Einstein shapes found by Smith. The first two shapes, Mr. Smith’s Hat and the Turtle, require some tiles to reflect, while the third shape, a variation of the Spectre, does not permit reflections. The proportions of each piece evoke the idea of a frieze, a long, narrow band where the same pattern is repeated. At first glance, the tiles appear repetitive, but with rotations in the pattern, any regularity is broken up. The single color family reminds us that the shapes are identical, while the lightest color is used to represent reflected tiles in Mr. Smith’s Hat and the Turtle. Finding beauty in this mathematical phenomenon, Heidi and Pete’s work is centered around their passion for science, technology, engineering, art, and math, and the way these concepts connect to shapes found in nature.