Interpreting natural structures and systems through visual traces

Abstract

I came to appreciate mathematics decades after my compulsory high-school math lessons were over. With a longer life experience, I came to see that math can be a fascinating and beautiful intellectual project and process for understanding the invisible foundations of everything in the universe. Aside from usingmath for practical daily applications, I understand the significance of mathematics on a purely intuitive level. Math is never the first thing that I think about when I make art, but it undergirds almost everything that I create. My work—in the form of paintings, drawings, site-specific installations, and public artworks—stems from patterns and traces of growth and transformation in the natural world and the built environment. As a child of a biologist, I grew up seeing electron micrographs and lab specimens, and much of my work refers obliquely to scientific images and ideas. It also reflectsmy long-term interest in the substance and subject of water and related themes, like fluid dynamics and features of watery environments. Through my art-making process, I interpret existing surfaces that record the effects of natural phenomena, employing photographs or drawn documents. From these sources, I develop works that aim to reveal and interpret the evidence of forces of nature on humanmade and natural structures. In my works, masses of lines evoke various influences: organic forms like plants, hair, muscles, and fungi; natural systems such as waves and wind currents; geological strata; topographical maps; and sound. These linear networks are often based on hand-drawn records of physical effects of nature in my immediate surroundings—like a bowed window frame, a sinking floor, or the decaying walls in my former studio. My process includes making tracings and rubbings of surfaces like wood grain, cracking plaster, corroding metal, and eroded stone. I think of these marks as the calligraphic signatures of quotidian natural effects and as interpretations of the material evidence of time. I also see structures and patterns of nature as very complex manifestations of mathematical formulae and processes, at scales both minute and vast. Throughmy work, I create intuitive interpretations of scientific data and evidence—and, by extension, of mathematical truths. By making works that respond to seemingly non-measurable phenomena like