Susan Happersett

Statement

My fascination with mathematics and my love of visual arts has led me on a journey to build a link between mathematics and drawing. It has become my mission to express the intrinsic aesthetic value of Mathematics in a purely visual language. I use a number of graphing and geometric plotting techniques to examine the aesthetic characteristics of functions, sequences and series in a visual language. My drawings are an intense accumulation of lines and mark making resulting from my predisposition to counting. These drawings have an inherent repetitiveness similar to knitting, weaving and lace making. Through the years my drawing has become a type of meditation. Most recently, I have started to create stop-motion animated short movies, based on my mathematical drawings. Through these movies, I hope to reveal the grace and balance in the mathematics of nature and technology.

Artworks

"Chaos - The Movie" is a stop-motion animation movie in which I create a line drawing based on Chaos Theory. The drawing - and the movie - were made over a period of six months. Music is an original composition made for the movie by Max Schreier. Meejin Hong did the video editing.

Fibonacci Scroll is a stop-motion animation of a long scroll drawing based on the Fibonacci Sequence. Susan Happersett has been creating mathematical, counted marking drawings for a number of years, but this is the first time her markings come to life. The sound track was composed specifically for the movie by Robert van Heumen, an accomplished composer and musician.