Mary Wahr

Statement

I am a working artist who teaches public and parochial students in grades one through twelve. I have a BFA from the University of Michigan and have just completed my Masters of Art Education through Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My thesis is based on the belief that students and the general public can understand and appreciate fractal art without doing the math. It is my intention to make math an every day occurrence for my students. My art is based on recursion, self-similarity, scaling, infinity and the fractal dimension. The majority of my work is rendered in pen and ink. My next fractal exploration is based on the human fractal and will incorporate color in my work.

Artworks

This is an abstract pen and ink rendering of a broccoflower. It is the first piece of art completed for my thesis and was the starting point of two years of research and art. Since my fractal ideas are accomplished without arithmetic, I needed to incorporate the components that define a fractal. This piece of art reflects the concepts of infinity, iteration, self similarity and scaling.