2007 Installation, magnetic tiles, magnetic paint, video

Endlessness (for Roger) consists of a number of tiles of two distinct shapes that are magnetised and can be moved about on a wall painted with magnetic paint. The wall work is accompanied by a video of the artist attempting to fill in a monitors viewing plane with these two tiles.

In 1974 Roger Penrose discovered two shapes that could tile an infinite plane aperiodically i.e. with a nonrepeating pattern. A Penrose tiling has many remarkable properties, most notably, it is nonperiodic, which means that it lacks any translational symmetry. More informally, a shifted copy will never match the original exactly. The original Penrose tiling was proposed in 1974 in a paper entitled 'The role of aesthetics in pure and applied research'. Not more than one fifth of the paper deals with it but Penrose admits that the tiling was its real point. Later Penrose acknowledged inspiration from the work of Johannes Kepler. In his book Harmonices Mundi Kepler explored tilings built around pentagons and it was shown that his construction can be extended into a Penrose tiling. Earlier traces of this idea have been traced to Dürer's work.

"Blackboxing: the isolation, acceptance and application of a body of knowledge outside of one's comprehension... If the term blackboxing means to accept a function or an application but not a method(ology), what is it - both scientifically and socially - that compels us to peer inside black-boxes? Brought together in the exhibition Blackboxing are a number of artists and intellectuals who have at the core of their practice a hunger for knowledge, and from whom this term has emerged...The Penrose non-periodic tile is the subject of Grace Weir's (IRL) installation Endlessness (for Roger), and we are treated to the evidence of her own efforts to complete the unsolvable puzzle. It is a mathematical certainty that the repetition of these specific tiles will never result in a repeating pattern - while they may lock in together, which is in itself a formidable challenge - the closer one comes to solving the puzzle the more they activate its futility. As Weir says - 'is that not a portrait of the universe?'"

Tessa Giblin, curator’s notes, Blackboxing, Project Arts Centre, Dublin.