Very early on in my explorations of tile design, I became frustrated by the limitations of pattern creation imposed upon me by the repetitions of a single tile. I also became impatient with simply replicating designs in the long established vocabularies. There was no need to execute designs that imitated Delft or Mexican talaveras or Portuguese azulejos or Persian Izniks. The marketplace was filled with abundant replicas of these established styles ranging widely in quality.

I encountered a matching scheme that used an A tile and a B tile that matched each other on all four sides. I noticed that this instantly increased the overall scale of the imagery and field. Yet the grid of the tiles was respected, unlike murals which ignore the grid entirely. Turning to my garden for inspiration, I began to create botanical images that spilled across the two tiles, thus creating designs freed from the constraint of the confines of the single tile.