Five Tyres Remoulded (portfolio), 1971

The project was pursued at various times and resulted in two works: Five Tyres Abandoned (1964) and Five Tyres Remoulded (1971). From 1951, Hamilton made a series of perspective drawings that led him, in 1964, to the first version of the work: a screenprint made with six different coloured stencils. Although Hamilton’s initial idea had been to emboss the paper with a very sharp relief, he failed to solve the technical problems and had to wait a further ten years until he could cut a brass plate with a specialised lathe and make the impression using silicone elastomer. Discovering he could not realise what he had in mind, he abandoned the project, titling the work Five Tyres Abandoned. Six years later, in 1970, when the American dealer Carl Solway saw the work in his studio, he offered to look for a program that would resolve the perspective problems with the aid of a computer.

To accurately execute the Five Tyres study, patterns were needed in the double curve of a torus (a type of convex, semi-circular geometric figure that contains nodules or protuberances, and which corresponds to the physical form of a tyre), which could only be achieved with the help of a computer. Thanks to the efforts of Solway, Sherill Martin of Kaye Instruments solved the computer formulation of perspective using an existent program by Fortran called Caper (Computer Aided Perspective). The result was Five Tyres Remoulded, consisting of white paper onto which the profiles of five different tyres are embossed; seven screenprints of computer-generated drawings showing specific aspects of pneumatic geometry, such as radial sections, dimensions, circumference sections or depth of tread; and a screenprint with a text from the 1951 journal Technique and Architecture, documenting the successive development of tyres from 1902 to 1950.