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My work, on occasion, has a mini-science lesson tucked somewhere inside. Sometimes I like to make smart art where I draw upon outside knowledge as a source of information and inspiration. In a recent painting, I used the Fibonacci sequence--a growth pattern frequently found in nature and things like nautilus shells and sunflowers--to dictate the arrangement of 54 small canvases into seven rows, and on this arrangement, I painted a fantastical, bold, and bright landscape. The connection between the Fibonacci sequence and the landscape is that both are derived from nature. Nature provided me with both the visual subject of this painting and the code to arrange the canvases. Sometimes, on the other hand, I like to make art that fits together, like a puzzle, where I devise my own code to dictate the arrangement or content of the piece. Recently, I made six large wooden keys to beÝstencils for tracing and extracting the curvy, notched shapes that result from placing two keys side by side. The six keys, arranged in dozens of different ways, yielded hundreds of irregular shapes that I traced on to paper and cut out to incorporate into an installation. The process of extracting the spaces inbetween the keys was the code for generating the content of this work. My work, almost always, has a mini-self portrait tucked somewhere inside. I think of keys as a sort of self-portrait because my set of keys is unique to me and functions as a passport to all the places I go every day. The six wooden keys I made in my last sculpture were exact replicas of the six keys I keep in my purse. Itís really terrible when I lose my keys, which is something I do at least once a week. Perhaps, I thought, in the process of making my keys much bigger I would become aware of their importance and stop losing them so often. My art must have been the perfect remedy. Since completing this sculpture, I havenít lost them once. |