Under glass: the art of intense seeing

Nature has always inspired my work. Long intrigued by its processes, most of my art is an inquiry into the transient and often unseen aspects of the natural world. An interdisciplinary education, including history, art, and science has influenced my way of seeing. It has taught me to look for interconnections between and across various fields of study. As a result, the influences on my work are diverse, incorporating ideas from the philosophical concept of the Sublime, art movements such as Romanticism and Abstraction, as well as modern environmental science and mathematics. Art and mathematics are seemingly unrelated areas of study, but share a common goal, which is to better understand and describe the world around us. While I locate my work mainly at the intersection of art and science, I have gained a deeper understanding of the natural world by learning more about various mathematical concepts and theories. Math, after all, is considered the ‘mother of all sciences’. Incorporating math and science into my artwork, I aim to inform people about the wonders and workings of nature and inspire new perspectives and understanding of the subject. Under Glass, my series of sculptural assemblages, highlights the many layers of complexity and almost continuous state of change present in the natural world. Attracted to these transient processes, our observations of them, and the ideas of nineteenth century citizen science, I collected natural objects and placed them under Victorian-style glass domes. Under glass, the objects are singled out for close examination and highlight the act of intense seeing (Tufte 2006) which is common to the practice of both art and science. Each seemingly simple object coupled with an engraved label on its dome seeks to explore the duality of perception and reality. One of the pieces in this series is titled Fibonacci Sequence (Figure 1). It consists of the cross-section of a nautilus shell with the first few numbers of the Fibonacci sequence – one of the world’s most famous mathematical formulas – engraved on its glass dome. Examples of the Fibonacci sequence and its associated ratio phi ( ), also known as the Golden Ratio, are found frequently in nature. It is seen, for example, in the spiral growth pattern of the scales of pinecones and the seeds of sunflowers. However, it is most famously associated with nautilus shells. Composed of chambered sections that provide buoyancy